FOREIGN POLICY/NORTH KOREA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Donald Trump’s decision to accept a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un caught the world off guard.
In agreeing to sit down with North Korea’s third-generation leader, Mr. Trump has boosted the stature of Mr. Kim—a man he has ridiculed as ‘Little Rocket Man’ and threatened with ‘fire and fury’—with a surprise diplomatic opening that left some allies wrong-footed. For Mr. Kim, who is half the age of Mr. Trump, just getting a summit meeting with the U.S. president is a big win. Neither his father nor his grandfather succeeded in getting a face-to-face meeting with a sitting U.S. president.
Mr. Trump’s move represents a victory for South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, who has pleaded with the U.S. to tone down its rhetoric and worked assiduously to get negotiations off the ground, and others who have pushed for engagement and diplomacy.
Other U.S. allies and some veteran negotiators, however, expressed concern that while a summit meeting could lead to a breakthrough in what has been a protracted standoff, it is a risky move that could lead to ill-considered concessions to Pyongyang. These skeptics have pointed to the speed with which the deal came together and the unusual way in which it was announced, as well as the unorthodox decision to start talks at the top. And they are exacerbated by Mr. Trump’s tendency to extemporize and the North Koreans’ long track record of duplicitous negotiation.”
-Jonathan Cheng and Alastair Gale, “How a Donald Trump-Kim Jong Un Summit Scrambles the Calculus for Key Players,” The Wall Street Journal online, Mar. 9, 2018 10:59am