Friday, June 15, 2018 | 2 a.m.
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Monday’s meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was historic, no doubt.
But the same can be said about Trump’s capacity to lie, deceive and obfuscate, unfortunately, which is why optimism about the outcome of the summit should be balanced with a healthy dose of circumspection.
Given that observers weren’t allowed into part of the meeting — and Trump’s revelation afterward that he’d spoken with Kim by phone in advance of it — questions about what exactly happened in those discussions abound.
At the top of the list: Beyond the broad points that were laid out in a joint statement from Trump and Kim, did Trump cut any other deals?
That’s not an idle query.
Trump already let one cat out of the bag by telling reporters that the U.S. would discontinue military exercises in South Korea. That concession surprised practically everybody, including South Korea and other U.S. allies, the U.S. military and even GOP lawmakers.
And with good reason. Kim had merely agreed that he would stop objecting to the exercises, so calling them off altogether was a major win for North Korea.
More so, Trump’s description of the exercises as “very provocative” made ears perk up, as it resembled North Korea’s rhetoric on the exercises.
“I was shocked when he called the exercises ‘provocative,’ a very unlikely word to be used by a U.S. president,” an unidentified South Korean official told Reuters.
Time will tell whether further revelations emerge from the summit, but it certainly wouldn’t be a shock if there was more to the meeting than the underwhelming points in the statement. Nor would it be particularly surprising if Trump, chasing personal glory and a major political win, negotiated toward goals that would benefit him directly.
Let’s not forget what happened another time Trump had an unobserved one-on-one with the leader of another nation — Trump’s January 2017 phone conversation with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Trump spent much of that 50-minute call trying to convince Peña Nieto to help him fulfill his campaign promise to build a border wall and make Mexico to pay for it.
“The only thing I will ask you, though, is on the wall: You and I both have a political problem,” Trump told Peña Nieto, “I have to have Mexico pay for the wall — I have to.
“So what I would like to recommend is — if we are going to have continued dialogue — we will work out the wall,” he said. “They are going to say, ‘Who is going to pay for the wall, Mr. President?’ to both of us, and we should both say, ‘We will work it out.’ It will work out in the formula somehow. As opposed to you saying, ‘We will not pay,’ and me saying, ‘We will not pay.’ ”
When Peña Nieto stood firm, Trump suggested that the Mexican president could privately negotiate a deal while maintaining his public opposition. Peña Nieto, to his credit, opted not to follow Trump’s duplicitous lead, and the two broke off the call with no movement on the wall.
That might have been the end of it, with the public unaware of what had happened. But the Washington Post obtained and published a transcript of the call, and it became a significant story.
Similarly, there may be much we don’t know yet about the Trump-Kim summit.
Ideally, that would include some sort of negotiations aimed at curbing North Korea’s human rights violations, but that seems doubtful. Trump has mentioned nothing about horrors that the nation’s people have experienced at the hands of the North Korean regime, and instead has praised Kim as “very talented” and a “very smart negotiator” who “loves his country very much.”
Try telling that to the prisoners who are forced to work in the nation’s mountain gulags where, according to the United Nations, they’re starved, tortured and raped.
That’s not to say the summit didn’t produce any positives. It’s certainly encouraging to see the U.S. and North Korea talking about denuclearization, as opposed to making threats or engaging in childish name-calling.
But given Trump’s aversion to the truth, this is a case in which it’s well worth wondering whether what we don’t know will hurt us.
