By Edwin Cooney
Okay, here it is! According to a headline I just read, President Trump thinks he can accomplish what no other president ever has been able to do — specifically, negotiate to America’s advantage with a leader of North Korea. After all, no other president has ever been named Donald John Trump! What I’m wondering is, what are President Trump and Premier Kim going to talk about? Up to this point, all that either man has ever done is bloviate at each other.
Historically, every president since Franklin Roosevelt has been very cautious before meeting an adversary at “the summit.” This meeting appears to have about as much preparation as did confrontations at high noon during American frontier days.
Actually, they have a lot to talk about. Kim Jong-un might well open by reminding President Trump that technically his country is still at war with the United Nations. The document signed at PanMunJom on Monday, July 27th, 1953 which halted the conflict between North and South Korea was a truce, not a peace. He might add that President Trump’s fellow Republicans have been mislabeling it as a peace ever since the ink dried on the document. Thus, his country has been denied sufficient respect for nearly 65 years. Additionally, some 60,000 forces from the United Nations and United States have been pointing some of the world’s most modern weapons at his little homeland since before he was even born.
President Trump might respond that North Korea has deliberately isolated itself by not participating in major conferences which have been held in East Asia ever since the Eisenhower Administration. In addition, President Trump is likely to remind Premier Kim of a series of hostile acts over the years — specifically, the capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo in late December of 1967 and the humiliating treatment of Captain Lloyd Bucher and his crew throughout all of1968.
Getting into the substance of things, Kim is likely to chide President Trump for his outrage over North Korea’s right to build a nuclear weapon’s system. After all, he may point out, North Korea is a sovereign nation which is free to act just like the United States, China or Russia.
President Trump may well respond that America has a special responsibility of leading a great alliance of nations since the end of World War II and has demonstrated over and over again that it has practiced diplomatic restraint despite countless broken promises and acts of aggression on the part of Russia, China and North Korea itself.
The two combatants are next likely to trade accusations as to who brought about each of these crises whereupon Kim will remind the President that the United States of America remains, after 73 years, the only nation to fire a nuclear weapon in anger. This observation is likely to lead once again into Kim’s justification for arming North Korea with weaponry many nations believe it is too poor to responsibly afford.
Once again, President Trump will surely remind Kim that his nuclear button is not only bigger than Kim’s but that it really works. Kim is likely to remind President Trump that North Korea is not alone in the world and that American “fire and fury,” even in the event of victory, will cost America’s taxpayers more than they can possibly imagine. He may well quote President Kennedy who observed during the November 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis address that “…even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth.”
The conversation might then degenerate into who has the greatest trust of the Russian and Chinese leadership. However, should their talk end there, the venture will surely be the bust most people expect it to be. If not, there may actually be some substance taken from this most unlikely meeting.
This meeting apparently requires two things. First, Kim must not interfere with military games which the United States and South Korea are scheduled to conduct in the next few weeks. Second, between now and the time of the meeting, Kim must keep his word not to conduct nuclear tests.
There is speculation even within the Trump administration that this meeting may never take place. After all, if there is to be no substantial result expected from the meeting, there will be little point to it. On the other hand, how much can either Trump or Kim afford to accomplish?
Might President Trump put sufficient pressure on South Korea to recognize North Korea? Were he to do that, how would that play in “Republican Peoria?” If President Trump actually recognizes the legitimacy of the North Korean government, what may he be compelled to do in the way of bilateral cooperation between the “land of the free” and one of the world’s “terrorist nations?”
This is an opportunity equal to President Obama’s strike against Osama bin Laden in May 2011, George W. Bush’s “shock and awe” strike against Saddam Hussein in March 2003, and Jimmy Carter’s Camp David venture in 1978 with Egypt’s Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. It may well be as dramatic as President Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972.
Ventures like the one President Trump announced shortly after 7 p.m. Thursday night is the dramatic stuff that historically justifies a presidency.
With either hope or trepidation (and perhaps some of both), we all wonder what this most bizarre of American presidents is up to. Back on Inauguration Day 2017, our newly minted Chief Executive pledged that he would ultimately be the best of all our presidents combined. Millions of us laughed with the derision such a pronouncement surely deserved. After all, outgoing President Obama had warned President-elect Trump that a peaceful resolution of the crisis with North Korea would be his greatest challenge. Even in the face of this warning, Donald Trump appears confident that because he is who he is, he will be the one to successfully fix this relationship and, thus, sometime during the next two months he will meet and confront Kim Jong-un.
If he extracts a stabler peace from this venture, he’ll be a hero. If he fails to be who he says he is, the rest of us will profoundly wish he’d never tried!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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