Is a Trump-Kim summit worth the risk?

Should the summit between United States President Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un take place?

It’s a question that is increasingly being asked by journalists and diplomats around the world as they try to fathom the next move between two of the most erratic and unpredictable men who have occupied positions of power in the modern era.

It is usually easy to get a handle on the presidents, prime ministers, secretaries and chairmen who lead their various countries around the world. Some are out-and-out autocrats — dictators whose sole purpose is to cling to power, soaking as much money as possible out of their economies, to be shifted only by death or revolution.

Then there are the democrats, subject to the will of the people at regular elections who come and go with often just the self-serving memoire to mark their passing.

Between the two extremes is a great deal of grey area: Dictators who pretended to be democrats by holding sham or rigged elections; democrats elected in a free vote that get a taste for the perks of the job and decide they will remove any barriers to keeping it by becoming dictators.

The latter group is sometimes a bit more difficult to pick, but that’s why we have diplomats and foreign policy experts to help us get it right.

But in Kim and Trump we have two men who should be easy to categorise, but are in fact giving governments around the world nightmares.

Is Kim softening his role as the absolute autocrat who threatens nuclear annihilation and is willing to slaughter members of his own family who he perceives as threats to his position? Absolutely not.

Yet he has suddenly gone on a charm offensive, sending a team to the South Korean Winter Olympics, travelling to China to meet President Xi Jinping, and preparing for a summit with South Korea’s Moon Jae-in.

And despite one of his famous tweets which expressed admiration for Xi’s recent conversion into a potential president for life, Trump remains, for better or for worse, the elected leader of the most powerful democracy on earth. That isn’t going to change.

Associate Professor at Pusan National University in South Korea, Robert Kelly, is one North Korea expert who believes that a meeting between Kim and Trump is not worth the risk. 

“Trump doesn’t know a great deal about Korea — we know he doesn’t read much, relying on television, and his national security staff is in chaos,” Kelly says, noting that John Bolton, who is said to be in favour of a pre-emptive strike on North Korea, is now the president’s National Security Adviser.

“In contrast, the North Koreans have been working on this stuff for a long time so they are going to come in knowing every detail and they are ready to negotiate down deep into the weeds.”

He believes Kim will initially try to steer away from denuclearisation with lengthy diatribes demanding reparations for US war crimes going back to the Korean War in the 1950s. Something which is bound to test Trump’s notoriously short attention span.

Among Kim’s likely demands once serious negotiations get under way is a total withdrawal of US forces from the Korean Peninsula — bound to send waves of apprehensive though the Government in Seoul.

Perhaps most worrying is Trump’s belief in himself as a deal-maker, possibly leading him to make an off-the-cuff offer “just to get the job done”, which might be totally unacceptable to South Korea and other US allies.

As yet there are no concrete details as to where and when this summit will take place. It is too big a deal to be quietly forgotten, but perhaps an indefinite postponement with lesser officials left to “work on the details” would be best for all.