THE COLLAPSE OF THE TRUMPIAN DREAM OF A NORTH KOREAN SUMMIT: A COMMENT

"President Donald Trump has cancelled a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un after a week when both sides fell back into the kind of rhetorical brinkmanship that had previously raised fears of military confrontation on the Korean peninsula. In a letter to Mr Kim on Thursday, Mr Trump said he would not travel to Singapore for a planned June 12 meeting because of the recent “tremendous anger and open hostility” that Pyongyang has aimed at Washington. “The Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place,” Mr Trump wrote. “You talk about nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.” Mr Trump later acknowledged to reporters that the cancellation was a “setback”, adding the Pentagon had assured him the US military was “ready if necessary”. North Korea on Thursday night, through its official news agency KCNA, reacted by saying that the “decision to scrap US-North Korea summit is not in line with the world’s wishes.” Pyongyang had indicated it was “still willing to resolve issues with the United States whenever, however.” “Kim Jong Un has made utmost efforts to hold a summit with US President Donald Trump,” according to the report".

Demetri Sevastopulo​, Katrina Manson and Bryan Harris, "Trump calls off summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un". The Financial Times. 24 May 2018, in www.ft.com.

When President Donald Trump canceled his June summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, he told him in a letter that the past few days of “tremendous anger and open hostility” had made it “inappropriate” for the two to meet and discuss denuclearization. “You talk about your nuclear capabilities,” Trump wrote, “but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.” The language echoed a January tweet in which the president wrote, “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” The two leaders seem to have made it clear that they are not ready to make the mutual accommodations necessary for diplomacy to succeed. In fact, beneath the surface, the current situation resembles the prelude to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which historical research continues to show was much more dangerous than anyone knew at the time. If the Trump-Kim summit stays canceled, and saber-rattling returns as the dominant mode of communication, the odds of military crisis will rise dramatically. And, as the Cuba experience shows, once begun, a military crisis involving nuclear weapons will almost inevitably bring lots of surprises—ones that could make the shocking twists and turns of the summit buildup look pedestrian by comparison.

George Perkovich, "What Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un Don't Know About Their Own Standoff". The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 25 May 2018, in www.carnegieendowment.org

The collapse of the proposed American-North Korean summit, while not per se a tragic or dangerous event, can as George Perkovich and others have written head in that direction. There is of course no reason for matters to go down the road of a nuclear and or military confrontation. The United States has in actuality nothing, repeat nothing to gain by commencing hostilities with North Korea. That is something which almost every American military planner who has cared to analyze the problem of North Korea in the past twenty-five years has come to terms with. The best and indeed the only rational means of dealing with North Korea is to retain as much economic pressure as is possible, for as long as is possible to hopefully cause the regime to collapse from within. That and deterrence are the best means of dealing with the conundrum of North Korea. To believe that at this stage of the game, when the North Koreans have tens if not more nuclear devices and ICBM's which may have projection power of one to two thousand miles, that bluster and rhetorical threats will do anything positive is the very mid-summer of madness. Unfortunately, when we are dealing with the American President, Mr. Trump, the mot 'madness' in a Emperor William the II sense, almost immediately come to mind. And that is truly the worrying aspect of this crisis.