It was something close to love at first sight, Donald Trump said of his initial meeting with the leader of North Korea – especially, it seems, for the smitten Kim Jong-un. “It was great chemistry,” the President told journalist Bob Woodward, before proceeding to compare their historic summit in Singapore in June 2018 to an actual romance. “You meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it’s all going to happen. It doesn’t take you 10 minutes, and it doesn’t take you six weeks. It’s like, whoa,” he said, according to Woodward’s new book, Rage.

Playing out in 25 never-before-revealed letters between Kim and Trump, obtained by Woodward, the deeply personal courtship between the two leaders of long-hostile nations has few precedents in diplomatic history. One is reminded, to some degree, of the deep, history-changing personal connection that Henry Kissinger struck with Chinese leader Zhao Enlai in the early 1970s. But the actual words exchanged between the US President and North Korean dictator often sound more like Marc Antony falling hard for Cleopatra, and vice versa.

Foreign Policy