NORTH KOREA/NUCLEAR/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump has imagined himself at the center of high-stakes nuclear negotiations since at least the mid-1980s, when he tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the Reagan administration that it needed a New York real estate deal maker to lead arms-control talks with the Soviet Union. When, in 1989, he ran into the man who filled that job for President George H.W. Bush, he had a bit of negotiating advice: Arrive late, poke your finger into your adversary’s chest and swear at him with a vulgar insult, he told Richard R. Burt. Now, Mr. Trump finally has a nuclear negotiation of his own to conduct, not with the Russians, but with a North Korean leader half his age, Kim Jong-un, the country’s volatile, repressive leader. But at Tuesday’s summit meeting, Mr. Trump seems certain not to follow his own advice on how to handle the talks, which involve a nuclear arsenal that is much smaller but in some ways scarier, because of North Korea’s unpredictability, than what threatened the United States during the Cold War.”
-David E. Sanger and Choe Sang-Hun, “For All His Deals, Trump Has Never Faced an Adversary Like Kim Jong-un,” The New York Times online, June 11, 2018