Maybe President Trump is a tougher negotiator than we thought.
There was a line of thinking ahead of Trump's summit this week with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that the president would be so eager to get something that appeared to be a deal — and so eager, too, for the praise and possible Nobel Peace Prize that might come with it — that he would end up giving away a lot and getting little in return. That wasn't an unreasonable belief: Trump had declared his previous summit with Kim a success without getting much beyond vague assurances from the dictator. Why would this time be any different?
It was absolutely different. Overnight, the talks between Trump and Kim suddenly — and unexpectedly — collapsed.
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"Basically they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn't do that," Trump said at a news conference after walking away from negotiations. "They were willing to de-nuke a large portion of the areas that we wanted, but we couldn't give up all of the sanctions for that, so we'll continue to work and we'll see. But we had to walk away from that particular suggestion. We had to walk away from that."
It was an odd moment: The sudden and premature end of negotiations is usually the kind of thing that results in recriminations. Instead, Trump and his team went out of their way to assure journalists that the relationship between the two leaders remains strong, even warm. It was completely unlike another famous collapse in nuclear negotiations, when President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev left the Reykjavik, Iceland summit in 1986, the pair were photographed with deep frowns on their faces as they took their leave of each other. Instead, Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seemed optimistic the peace effort would survive and negotiations will continue.
"I hope our teams will get together in the days and weeks ahead and work out," Pompeo told the news conference. "It's a very complex problem. We have said since the beginning this would take time."
Conventional wisdom will suggest that the details of any deal should have been worked out before Trump and Kim even arrived in Vietnam — that summits are pageants where leaders put their signatures on agreements that have already been finalized by their teams. But it should be obvious now that the current situation with North Korea is different than anything that has come before it. The personalities and circumstances in this particular relationship are highly unusual, so most of the "normal" rules of diplomacy don't apply.
Trump held fast on denuclearization. We'll undoubtedly learn more details about what happened in the talks — and why they suddenly ended — in the days and weeks ahead. If Trump and Pompeo are to be believed, though, the summit ended because Kim wanted the United States to drop its sanctions on North Korea without North Korea offering sufficient progress towards nuclear disarmament. Trump, it turns out, didn't want a deal that badly.
The president did, however, seem to leave some wiggle room open for future negotiation.
"There is a gap," Trump said. "We have to have sanctions and he wants to de-nuke, but he wants to just do areas that are less important than the areas that we want."
This hopefully isn't the end of the peace process. The ratcheting up of tensions between India and Pakistan this week should begin to illustrate how dangerous it can be when nuclear-armed powers can't find a way to avoid conflict. It remains the case that any war with North Korea would be a disaster for everybody involved. So it's good — and hopefully instructive — to remember that a year after the Reykjavik summit ended so badly, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty that began a generational effort to reduce each country's nuclear stockpile.
In North Korea, President Trump is working toward peace, but is apparently unwilling to give away the store. That a man known for embracing extremes and ignoring moderation has seemingly found a middle ground — a readiness to talk while remaining firm on the need for some real concessions from Kim — is weirdly, unexpectedly normal. In that sense, Trump has defied expectations.
