Kim jong-un

On a humid summer’s day in Singapore three years ago today, Donald Trump became the first incumbent US president to meet with his North Korean counterpart. For all of the summit’s theatre, Kim Jong-un’s pledge to ‘work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula’ seems unlikely to be realised. Three years on, and the country shows little intention of either abandoning its nuclear ambitions or reforming Pyongyang. Instead, the regime has tightened its control over society, not least ideologically, after the failure of the Supreme Leader’s five-year economic plan. In 2018, the leadership assured North Koreans that the country had achieved its primary geopolitical aim of becoming a ‘fully-fledged nuclear state’.

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.

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.

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.

‘Trudeau or Trump?’ was a choice which Theresa May, with unusually ready wit, evaded in Parliament on Monday. No doubt I am in a minority, but I feel that, of the two, Mr Trudeau — the G7 host at La Malbaie — is the more absurd figure on the world stage, being just as vain as the President and far more pointless (if you doubt me, compare the two men’s tweets). In the same parliamentary statement, Sir Vince Cable asked ‘What is the point of the G7?’ It is part of President Trump’s subversive skill that his actions prompt people to ask such questions.

Donald Trump means different things to different people. To his core supporters, he’s the man who will make America great again.  To his diehard opponents, he is a dangerous juvenile with authoritarian tendencies. Ultimately, these descriptions are secondary to how Trump sees himself: a tough, dealmaking Svengali who has the experience and power of persuasion to get a deal that is advantageous to himself and to the people he represents. Democrats laugh and dismissively wave off that mindset as self-delusion. Even some Republicans would likely roll their eyes in private. Trump, of course, knows this too well - which is why his dalliance with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un this week is such a pivotal moment for his own sense of confidence as a leader.

President Trump’s acceptance of talks about denuclearisation must have been as big a shock to Kim Jong-un as his offer was to the USA. So Kim is probably scrambling, too. And if there is a positive outcome, he will live to regret it. In the 2nd century bc the two big Mediterranean players were Rome and the vast Hellenistic ‘empire’ to the east, left behind by Alexander the Great and ruled by assorted ‘kings’ descended from his generals. The Hellenistic king Antiochus IV had ambitions to extend his power west into Greece and Egypt. Knocked back by Rome, in 168 bc he took advantage of disunity in Judaea to establish a power base there, and attacked Jerusalem.

Donald Trump’s acceptance of Kim Jong-un’s invitation to meet is a master stroke. It’s exactly the kind of thing Ronald Reagan liked to do. Reagan, you may recall, announced his pursuit of a missile defence system in March 1983 on national television without alerting his advisors beforehand. Liberals went crazy. Then he decided to end the Cold War by reaching out to Mikhail Gorbachev. Conservatives went bonkers. Reagan, we were told, had become a useful idiot. Today he is hailed as a visionary by all and sundry. Whether Trump’s move will work depends in part on how eager the North Korean regime is to escape the increasingly draconian sanctions that have been imposed upon it.

As Kim Jong-un might blow up the world next year, if not this, and people are forever trying to work out what is going on in his country, perhaps it is worth describing a military parade I attended in Pyongyang a few years back. The occasion was the centenary of the birth of the current Kim’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, the founder of the Marxist monarchy who, despite his death more than two decades ago, remains Eternal Leader of the nation. Other attendees included some flotsam and jetsam of the Cold War, a reunion of the Axis of Evil and representatives from various other rogue states and immiserated nations. Presuming it to be one of the better covers under which to pass as an admirer of the regime, I claimed to be a schoolteacher from England.

Among the many new political maladies of our age, one has been left largely undiagnosed. This is Trump Derangement Syndrome, a condition whereby intense dislike of the 45th president renders sufferers unable to understand what he is trying to do or allow that he is capable of success. Trump is hard to admire, it’s true, and seems to revel in his ability to appal. But therein lies the secret of his power: with a few tweets, he can set the world’s news agenda and drive his critics to distraction. Take this week, when he tweeted that his nuclear arsenal is larger than that of Kim Jong-un. His comments were seized upon as yet another example of his idiocy and his playground logic.