Trump takes 20 steps into history but dictator slow to progress

Trump’s latest meeting with Kim is compelling theatre but these exchanges only re­produce an old pattern.

Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un at the border between North and South Korea yesterday during their historic meeting. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump’s love of reality theatre led him into another ­bizarre meeting with Kim Jong-un, the extravagantly Stalinist dictator of North Korea.

We don’t need to believe this meeting really emerged from a single Trump tweet to recognise the extreme oddness of the event.

And it was historic in a way for Trump to do what almost every visitor to the border area known as the Demilitarised Zone does: taking a step across into what is technically North Korean territory. Trump is the first sitting president to do that.

It is impossible to know if anything good is going to come from this series of Trump-Kim meetings: Singapore last year, Hanoi in February, the Demilitarised Zone now and an invitation for Kim to visit the White House.

So far it has all been compelling theatre without any substance at all. Let’s be quite clear. Although the theatre is new and astonishing, the substance of the Trump-Kim exchanges is re-­producing a very old pattern.

That pattern is this: the North Koreans engage in big, provocative tests that substantially ­advance their nuclear program, the American president threatens to attack them, they back off, but keep the much higher level of capability acquired in the tests and some kind of peace process is inaugurated, which the North Koreans inevitably cheat on or walk away from after a few years.

That pattern was followed very precisely with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, with the North Koreans in all fake seriousness promising to give up their nuclear weapons.

Trump is offering the same deal: economic development for North Korea in exchange for ­denuclearisation.

But so far the world has seen not one jot of denuclearisation.

North Korea has not engaged in new nuclear tests and it has not tested long-range ballistic missiles. Again this is an old pattern: a flurry of tests is followed by a long period of no tests.

But Pyongyang has resumed short-range missile tests — certainly missiles that could reach South Korea and Japan.

Trump spoke airily in Singapore last year about North Korea denuclearising within a year. So far there is no sign at all of anything happening on that front and a lot of satellite imagery that shows the North building up ­nuclear and missile sites.

The North Koreans have ­always wanted a summit with a US president, to give them legitimacy and to break the momentum of sanctions. Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il, welcomed then secretary of state Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang and had wanted desperately to welcome Bill Clinton instead.

What Trump’s series of meetings has effectively done is legitimise Kim Jong-un internationally. A few years ago Kim had not held meetings with any foreign leaders. He now holds regular summits not only with Trump, but with China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and has been a feted guest in Singapore and Hanoi.

This legitimacy has helped him get Chinese and Russian sanctions, among others, effectively eased.

In recent weeks North Korea’s press has lambasted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, calling for his resignation and criticising the Americans for not lifting their own sanctions.

Trump’s advisers have kept him from doing that until North Korea takes big, real steps on ­denuclearisation.

There is no indication Kim will ever do that.

Trump’s goal seems to be to keep the theatre going so he can sell this bizarre process as a diplomatic triumph.