BUSINESS/CANADA/EU/FOREIGN POLICY/NORTH KOREA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump’s eager embrace of Kim Jong-un of North Korea this week, on the heels of an acrid falling-out with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, raised an obvious, if confounding, question: Why would an American president offend allies and cozy up to adversaries? If there was an answer in Mr. Trump’s tumultuous week on the global stage, it may be that he disregards the traditional preoccupations of American foreign policy — power and values — in favor of a more narrow worldview shaped by his experience as a businessman…Mr. Trump’s bitter clashes with Canada and Europe over trade, as well as his solicitous courtship of North Korea’s brutal dictator, all reflect this mercantile perspective. In his transactional approach to foreign policy, considerations of financial profit or cost — often measured in ways that economists deem simplistic — can outweigh virtually any other consideration…That does not mean Mr. Trump is necessarily interested in North Korea as a trade partner or an investment opportunity for the United States. But his view of the challenges posed by the Korean Peninsula are colored — and perhaps limited — by his background in business. In Mr. Trump’s meetings with Mr. Kim — the first for a sitting president and a North Korean leader — he soft-pedaled traditional American concerns like regional security and human rights. Instead, he celebrated North Korea’s economic potential and pitched Mr. Kim like a property developer proposing to build condominiums on a reclaimed Superfund site.”
-Mark Landler, “For Trump, Power and Values Matter Less Than Dollars and Cents,” The New York Times online, June 13, 2018