Robert Carlin on 38 North discusses the correspondence of former President Trump with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. Communicating with the DPRK is via a slender thread: these letters and dubious propaganda are two of the more common methods. Carlin’s money quote on this particular collection:
The amount of attention commentators and reporters devoted to the unctuous opening sections in the letters has helped foster the sense that this was an effort by one leader to tap dance on the other party’s head. To be sure, President Trump’s letters reflected what some in the business world might consider good psychological tactics, buttering up the opponent. It’s not clear how effective this was with the North Korean leader. Some of Trump’s tactics, oozing praise for Kim, may have struck Pyongyang as belittling, in effect patting Kim on the head—nice doggie. Thus, concerns that Kim was trying to bamboozle the president with flattery need to be balanced against the realization that the president was playing the same game. If Pyongyang was only judging by the president’s glowing public characterizations of Kim’s letters, it might have concluded its approach was working. However, a close reading of Kim’s letters to Trump makes clear the North Korean leader could see that, whether or not his flowery words really touched the heart or fed Trump’s ego, they were clearly not having an impact on US policy.
And how much was that Trump being smart, and how much of that was his advisor’s digging in their heels? Maybe we’ll know in twenty or thirty years.
