“Sometimes You Have to Walk” Trump returns from the Hanoi Summit Without a Deal
On the final day of February 2019, President Donald Trump returned to the United States without having secured a commitment from North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. A scheduled luncheon, along with a subsequent signing ceremony, was abruptly scuttled when the President decided that Kim’s offer to close the country’s largest nuclear enrichment facility, located in Yongbyon, North Korea, was not sufficiently commensurate with the lifting of all sanctions that the North Korean leader had also requested.
“Sometimes, you have to walk,” said the President during a brief press conference prior to his departure from Hanoi, Viet Nam, where the summit between the two leaders had previously been scheduled to take place, earlier in February.
According to various reports, the North Korean leader was stunned to learn that the United States had far more knowledge of several supposedly “secret” enrichment facilities than previously thought.
The President told reporters that he was looking for Kim “…to do more regarding his commitment to denuclearize, but he was unprepared to do that.”
President Trump, who has had considerable experience over many decades in brokering large financial deals, and who authored a best-seller The Art of the Deal in the 1980s, knew what Ronald Reagan knew when the former President walked away from an arms treaty with then-Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland. Reagan’s insistence that such an arms treaty was not worth the price of scuttling the Strategic Defense Initiative, derisively nicknamed “Star Wars,” and that standing strong and refusing a quick deal would lead to a better deal down the road.
It was a lesson that was evidently lost on President Barack Obama, who infamously signed onto a one-sided deal with Iran, handing over billions in cash in exchange for no substantial commitment from the Iranians to halt missile production and uranium enrichment. Obama thought, erroneously, that it was better to have a bad deal than no deal at all.
Thank goodness that it was not Obama in Hanoi trying to leverage an agreement with the North Koreans. Then again, Obama refused to even confront the growing threat of North Korea’s nuclear arms buildup, by instead emphasizing “strategic patience” (a euphemism for doing nothing) when dealing with the North Korean push towards deliverable nuclear weaponry.
Practically everyone, including Democrats, anti-Trump/Never Trump Republicans, the national news media and so-called “experts” from previous administrations were predicting, and in some cases hoping for, failure on the part of Trump, in his second sit-down with Kim Jong Un. Many were saying that the North Korean Leader would “flatter” the President into signing a deal without any substantial commitment by the North Koreans to give up their nuclear weapons program. Once again, the President overcame the low expectations of his political opponents by standing strong in the face of opposition, and rejecting a bad deal based solely on its own merits- or rather, lack thereof.
While vehement Trump-haters rejoiced in the fact that no deal came of the Hanoi Summit, wiser and more informed heads from both political parties agreed that the President was right to walk away from the summit without an agreement. The fact that the President refused to sign an agreement, merely for the sake of signing an agreement, also showed the watching world once again, including most importantly China, that the days of the United States being “rolled” into pursuing bad treaties has ended. As the United States is trying to use its economic muscle to forge a better, more mutually-beneficial trade agreement with China, the lack of an agreement with North Korea may bode well for negotiations between the world’s two largest economies.
The question is whether or not Trump’s political adversaries, who tend to prefer national failure to the possibility of Trump’s successes, will continue to root against the President and by extension, America itself.
We watch, and wait…
-Drew Nickell, 1 March 2019
© 2019 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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