I’m starting to wonder if Donald Trump, bestselling author of The Art of the Deal, just isn’t very good at making deals. His presidency has been a ceaseless torrent of promises about what he’ll achieve from negotiations with foreign leaders. But time and again, he ends up high and dry.
Right now, the administration is waiting to find out what the North Korean regime meant when it made the ominous vow to give the United States a “Christmas gift” if talks didn’t produce an agreement on nuclear weapons and economic sanctions by year’s end. No such accord has been reached, which confirms the bankruptcy of Trump’s strategy.
He started out in 2017 by threatening Kim Jong Un with “fire and fury” if he made threats. But then the two agreed to a 2018 meeting in Singapore — a made-for-TV spectacle that produced an agreement short on meaningful specifics. About all Trump got in return for giving Kim the propaganda opportunity was a halt in missile tests and the purported demolition of a test site. Continue reading