Slate "Love Can't Buy a Nuclear Deal. Trump and Kim failed to reach a breakthrough in Hanoi"

For now, that may be for the best."

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/trump-kim-hanoi-summit-nuclear.html

There’s a bright side to the collapse of the second Trump-Kim summit. Maybe the two leaders—who dreadfully miscalculated each other’s interests and pliability going into this get-together—will learn some lessons about what’s achievable in U.S.-North Korean relations.

The talks in Hanoi broke down when it became clear that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un would take no steps toward de-nuclearization until all economic sanctions against his country were lifted—and even then, he would shut down just one of his reactors and do nothing else, not even submit a list of how many weapons he had or where they were. That was too much even for Trump, who declared the summit was over with no results, not even a hackneyed joint statement.

How did this happen?

Kim thought Trump was so desperate for a deal—for a place in history and a distraction from his domestic troubles—that he would agree to anything. It is to Trump’s credit that he walked out upon realizing that Kim’s insistence on such an extreme, one-sided deal was immovable. But it is Trump’s fault for letting this near-inevitable disaster go forward in the first place.


One lesson Trump should draw from this cock-up is that previous presidents had a reason for putting off summits until their diplomats lined up all (or almost all) the pins ahead of time. If Kim wasn’t going to budge an inch until all sanctions were lifted, there never should have been a summit.

Trump was arrogant in believing he could fix everything in face-to-face banter; that only he could make a deal—not just a deal, but the deal of the century—and that the diplomatic corps was rigid and useless. His diplomats—and even his handpicked North Korea emissary, Stephen Biegun—had been meeting with Kim’s team for months, to no avail, mainly because Kim believed he could get a better deal if he waited for the one-on-one with Trump. Trump encouraged him to believe just that, saying he was in no hurry for his new best friend to begin disarming. On the eve of the summit, word went out that the U.S. would be fine if Kim declined to submit an itemized list of his nuclear facilities, which U.S. officials had previously deemed a prerequisite for further progress in these talks, and logically so—it’s impossible to verify disarmament without knowing how many arms exist at the outset.


snip - read the rest at the link above