Foreign Affairs: Historic Breakthrough or Historic Blunder

Post-summit consensus is that the US president was naïve, too trusting of a brutal dictator seeking attention for developing nuclear weapons. Trump, who withdrew from a detailed deal with Iran, signed a vague agreement with North Korea extracting a promise “to work toward complete denuclearization” – the terms weaker than what were offered to previous presidents before subsequently being broken. Trump treated the summit like an episode in a reality show – pomp and promises with no specifics. “No previous U.S. president considered it prudent to embark on summitry with so little preparation or on terms so favorable to the other side, let alone to promise to unilaterally discontinue defensive joint U.S.–South Korean military exercises on the Korean Peninsula,” writes Daniel R. Russel for Foreign Affairs, emphasizing North Korea’s troubling record on compliance. “Kim is not interested in the Libyan model; he’s interested in the Pakistani model.” Kim seeks reductions in sanctions and US troops in South Korea as well as divisions among US allies. Trump has a reputation for back-tracking. Government experts have some cleanup to do, clarifying terms of the agreement, but the United States has lost leverage with other countries for containing North Korea. – YaleGlobal