World

No diplomats anywhere enjoy dealing with North Korea. Pyongyang is difficult, indeed obstreperous at the best of times, while the Kim dynasty and its emissaries are notorious worldwide for their aggressive and undiplomatic trash-talking when they are displeased. Which they frequently are. Donald Trump’s quixotic effort to make nice with the world’s strangest regime was therefore always a long shot, while his desire to denuclearize North Korea in exchange for diplomatic normalization and economic development was based in what can be kindly called fantasy thinking. That has just been made painfully evident in Hanoi, where the much-ballyhooed second summit between President Trump and the North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un fell apart with no deal of any kind.

Cable networks have countless hours to fill, and it is far easier to fill them with speculation about a closed-door summit than to wait patiently for real news. We won’t have that news until the Trump-Kim summit ends. Oh, we might get a nudge about whether the talks are going well, but nothing more. That’s how secretive negotiations work. To save time, here’s the essential background. It covers almost everything you can hear — and several things you won’t — for the next 24 hours ‘live from Hanoi’ on all the networks. Kim Jong-un’s only goals are to stay alive and in power. To that end, he and his father have spent enormous resources to build deliverable nuclear weapons, with substantial aid from China.

To the grand, art nouveau Café Louvre in Prague, once one of Franz Kafka’s favorite haunts in the Czech capital. Cockburn is here to meet another – very different – Czech figure of historical importance: Karl Koecher, the only KGB agent known to have infiltrated the CIA. He is relevant again because of a strange story claiming that Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, John Bolton, visited a New York sex club called Plato’s Retreat. Koecher went there too, when he was a Soviet spy. Is it possible that the Kremlin has kompromat – compromising material – on Bolton, dating from the 1970s and 1980s?

If only President Richard Nixon could go to China, per the hoary Beltway cliché, perhaps only yours truly could write this column. Longer than just about anybody, I’ve warned the public about the threat to Western democracy posed by Vladimir Putin’s aggressive spies and weaponized lies. As a counterintelligence officer for the National Security Agency, I was combating Russian propaganda, what they call Active Measures, two decades ago. When the NSA contractor Edward Snowden defected to Moscow in June 2013, I called him out as the Kremlin agent he is — as the Kremlin subsequently admitted — which won me few friends among the great and the good.

The President’s father, Fred Trump, had a rule: for some business, you only ever want to meet one person at a time. Then it’s their word against yours. If you have a meeting of three people, then you have two people to give evidence against you. This is the story, anyway, from people who know the Trump family and the Trump family legend. Fred Trump supposedly had links with both the Democratic Party machine and the mob in the New York borough of Queens. If the story about his rule is true, it would have served him well as he built up his property empire – allegedly with methods that might not have borne scrutiny. Someone deep inside Trumpworld tells Cockburn Donald Trump adopted his father’s rule as his own. ‘He never writes anything down.

Judging from the weekend’s ‘modern presidential’ tweets – always a decent metric of Donald Trump’s mood swings – the Special Counsel investigation into his Russian links is weighing heavily on our 45th president. And no wonder. New reports indicate that Donald J. Trump may be in a lot hotter water than his MAGA legions want to believe. According to the New York Times, the FBI in the opening months of Trump’s administration opened a counterintelligence investigation into the new president to assess whether he is a pawn of the Kremlin, wittingly or otherwise.

Forget all the nuclear threats or pumped-up rhetoric, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un might just be the most boring of world leaders for one reason: he consistently tells us what he is going to do then tries to do it. Case in point. For the last few years, Kim has been very clear about setting his agenda for the coming year in the most public of ways, letting the world know his plans. In a now annualized New Year’s Day Address, Kim in 2017 told the world he would test ICBMs — weapons that can, at least in theory, hit the US homeland. Last year, he signaled he was ready for a better relationship with South Korea and participate in the Olympics, which ended up being the foundation of the détente we see today between Pyongyang, Seoul and Washington.

To much fanfare and glee last week, federal prosecutors announced a plea deal had been secured for Maria Butina, the mystery woman who populated DC conservative circles for a short period around the 2016 election. The popular interpretation of her travails, circulated with gusto in the press since her arrest in July, was that Butina – an attractive young woman, and, most damningly, a Russian national – had used her sexual prowess to trick gullible middle-aged Republican men into granting her access. She did this, or so the story went, at the behest of her menacing benefactors as part of the sprawling Kremlin campaign to ‘interfere’ in American politics.

What if the foreign-policy elites in Washington, D.C. could admit the truth when it comes to North Korea? The fact is that there is next to nothing the Trump administration can do to rid the world of this nuclear nightmare unless Kim Jong-un’s regime is willing to deal his weapons away. At the moment, we are nowhere near a deal to denuclearize North Korea. Just trying to even figure out where we are in talks with Pyongyang is confusing enough. Inter-Korean détente is moving forward at a rapid pace. It should be called the Moon Miracle, since South Korea's president has staked his entire legacy on securing peace and deserves much of the credit.