Professor Henry Srebrnik

Professor Henry Srebrnik

Monday, May 30, 2016

Mr. Trump Goes to Pyongyang … Maybe

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced on May 17 that he is willing to talk to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to try to persuade him to abandon Pyongyang’s nuclear program. 

Some experts think Kim could have more than 20 nuclear weapons by the end of this year.

“I would speak to him, I would have no problem speaking to him,” the New York business mogul said of Kim.

Such a meeting would mark a significant change of U.S. policy towards the politically isolated regime. Trump’s proposal challenges the belief that talking to dictators constitutes approval or legitimisation.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton decried Trump’s “bizarre fascination with foreign strongmen.” She added that his foreign policy “made no sense.”

But this is nonsense. As Trump contends, during face-to-face interaction, you get to know your adversaries, learn what they want, and perhaps discern weaknesses. 

The neoconservative hawks who dominate the opinion pages of the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have all ridiculed Trump for trying to seek a way out of the cul-de-sac in which American foreign policy remains stuck, a quarter century after the end of the Cold War. 
 
Trump has seriously questioned long-sacred American policies toward Europe, Asia, and the Middle East and has even been critical of NATO, which began as an anti-Soviet alliance. All this is anathema to the Washington foreign policy establishment.

Yes, Kim runs what is probably the world’s most bizarre and repressive regime. And he works day and night to perfect a nuclear weapons capability designed to alter the balance of power in east Asia.

Trump knows this, of course, so he has also suggested that Japan and South Korea expand their own military capabilities. (Does the U.S. really need to retain its huge military base on the Japanese island of Okinawa, whose personnel cause constant friction with the island’s population?)

Let’s consider some historical context here. Richard Nixon travelled to China at the height of the Cultural Revolution to meet with Mao Zedong, a murderer responsible for the deaths of more people than Hitler and Stalin combined. Did the sky fall in? 

 On the contrary, Nixon’s meeting with Mao is now seen as the beginning of a rapprochement with Beijing. Consequently, China moved away from its ideological insanity and isolationism to become a global economic power – indeed, a more successfully capitalist country than the United States.

This past March, Barack Obama went to Cuba and spoke with Raul Castro, thus ending another outdated after-effect of Cold War animosity: the 55 years of estrangement between Havana and Washington. 

More recently, Obama not only visited Communist Vietnam but indicated the U.S. will sell arms to Hanoi. Who could have imagined that 40 years ago?

Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama were all frustrated in their dealings with the mercurial leadership in North Korea; George W. Bush famously went so far as to describe the country as part of an “Axis of Evil.”

Can Trump dig the hole any deeper? Maybe -- but the hole is already very deep. Sometimes it makes sense to cut through red tape and cut to the chase. 

The North Koreans have dismissed the offer as propaganda and “nonsense.” But that’s to be expected as an initial return volley. Things can always change.

A summit with Kim might trigger as great a shift as that initiated by Nixon’s visit to China. There is certainly no harm in trying.

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