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.
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Castro, thus ending another outdated after-effect of Cold War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.
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