NORTH KOREA/RUSSIA/SUMMIT/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Nothing in his summit with Kim Jong Un became President Donald Trump like the leaving it (to paraphrase Macbeth). ‘Sometimes you have to walk,’ Trump said at a closing news conference in Hanoi, after his abortive talks with the North Korean dictator. At least he had a closing news conference. The last walk-away summit—in Reykjavik, between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—had none. Reagan left the Iceland capital on October 12, 1986, so furious that none of us traveling with him dared to approach him for a while. His body language—livid red face, pursed lips and relentless pacing back and forth back in the U.S. ambassador’s residence after that summit collapsed—told the story then. But not the story for long. That president soon calmed down and plunged on. And if the recent Hanoi summit is going to have a shot at being the Reykjavik of our time, as Sean Hannity and others have suggested, this president should, too. What’s the big lesson of the first walk-away summit for the second? Simply that bounce-back is possible.”
–Ken Adelman, “Here’s How Trump’s Failed Hanoi Summit Could Be the Reykjavik of Our Time,” Politico, March 1, 2019