Daily Times

Donald Trump’s dramatic meeting with North Korea’s leader may have been choreographed to look like a Nixon-goes-to-China moment, but the summit appears to have failed to secure any concrete commitments by Pyongyang for dismantling its nuclear arsenal.

Although Trump was quick to declare success for the unprecedented summit with Kim Jong Un marked by handshakes and smiles, experts said a joint statement signed in Singapore seemed mostly to rehash old broken promises made by Pyongyang to successive US administrations.

That suggested that any lasting benefit to Trump on the world stage or at home will depend on whether, in the next stages of negotiations, he can turn the summit’s made-for-TV script into tangible progress toward Pyongyang’s nuclear disarmament. Trump’s supporters, who relish his unconventional diplomatic style, are likely to hail the summit as a foreign policy win for the president over one of America’s most bitter long-time foes even as he feuds with Washington’s closest allies after leaving an economic summit in Canada in disarray over the weekend. On the domestic front, Trump is likely to tout his diplomatic engagement with North Korea as proof he is working to protect the United States as part of his “America First” agenda, although the summit did not appear to yield specific safeguards against Pyongyang’s long-range nuclear missiles.

Fellow Republicans, however, could attempt to use the summit to bolster their contention that American voters should allow them to retain control of Congress in pivotal congressional elections in November. Many experts remained sceptical that Kim will ever give up his nuclear weapons, even though Trump insisted the process of denuclearisation will start “very, very quickly.” “Unfortunately, we do not know if Kim has made a strategic decision to denuclearise and it is unclear if further negotiations will lead to the end goal of denuclearisation,” said Anthony Ruggiero, senior fellow at Washington’s Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank. “This looks like a restatement of where we left negotiations more than 10 years ago and not a major step forward.”

Published in Daily Times, June 13^th 2018.