I am reasonably sure that over the next few months, it will become even more apparent that the administration of Donald Trump's Presidency is/was the worst in history. On reflection, not even the administration of 15th President James Buchanan which actually saw the country break apart into the nation's bloodiest war, was more of a case of impotence in the face of circumstance as opposed to incompetence resulting in the attack upon the Capitol by the administration's own supporters. The last days of the Trump Administration have proven that it needed to be put out rather than merely fading out.
Despite the insane and intense amount of corruption which have occurred, the optimist in me still wants to find one glimmer of goodness in all of this. That's going to sound strange to regular readers of this blog who usually get the end of a process where I have work-hardened rage into a useful tool for breaking things apart into smaller parts for analysis. However, it might not be unfamiliar as play a contrarian tune.
For reasons that possibly can only be explained through the lens of Donald Trump acting on behalf of Donald Trump, in 2018 he visited the North Korean President Kim Jong Un. There are almost certainly a host of reasons why this was advantageous to North Korea including that they could finally claim a degree of legitimacy by speaking to "the leader of the free world" and maybe nothing of any import was actually achieved in the long run but what can not be overlooked here is something very important. They spoke.
Let me reiterate that. They spoke.
In a very literal sense all that was achieved was a single page memorandum of understanding, which is by any measure of policy and/or economic development completely useless but it still remains to be said that the President of the United States and the Supreme Leader of North Korea actually spoke with each other.
North Korea probably thought that they gained some kind of prestige on the world stage and with the unified Korean team at the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, for a short period of time they may have actually done so but in time the bunting has faded. It is difficult to see what the United States gained from the meeting and at the time sections of the media decried it as diminishing the office of the Presidency but while it is true that Donald Trump used that meeting (and indeed most of his time in office) for the glory of Donald Trump, I don't really see how it diminished the office in the long run. History will conclude that he is a bad President but the office will outlive him.
I don't think that it can be stressed how important that any kind of dialogue was opened up at all with North Korea. The United States' policy and indeed most of the world's policy for the past 70 odd years has been to either stand and point or stand and yell and point at North Korea and expect them to change. The political inertia¹ is such that pointing and yelling is never going to achieve anything.
It simply makes no sense for the strongest person in the schoolyard to yell at the weird kid who says that they have a knife, for fear of them actually having a knife and wanting to use it. Quite frankly, the United States enjoys its role as the strongest person in the schoolyard but even it has learned that it can not win every argument through sheer brute force.
The most important relationships that North Korea has with the rest of the world does not include the United States but rather includes Russia and Japan who are wary, China who might be an ally, and South Korea where the relationship can best be described as complex. It is worth remembering that the 2018 North Korea–United States Singapore Summit happened in June of 2018; which came after the "Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification of the Korean Peninsula" which was signed in April, earlier that yet. Arguably this started well beforehand with the current president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in in 2017; whose government has tried to restart what had previously been known as the Sunshine Policy.
Quite obviously, North Korea wants to continue to exist and doesn't want the South to absorb it; while also obviously North Korea wants to continue to exist and doesn't want the North to start flinging weapons over the border. Seoul is less than 50km from the border with North Korea; which means that if the North were to launch a nuclear missile then the total scramble time would be less than four minutes, and impossible to evacuate. Suffice to say that while the two countries exist, there will always be tensions between the two countries. The best that the United States can do from the other side of an ocean, is to remain well out of any talks, save to act as a peace maker.
If I was Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else then I would have done exactly what President Trump did and fly² to North Korea for talks with Kim Jong Un. Even during the height of the Cold War, dialogue was kept open between Washington and Moscow; at one point Nikita Khrushchev and President Dwight Eisenhower for a state dinner at the White House and Eleanor Roosevelt but wasn't allowed to go to Disneyland. Richard Nixon visited China and went to loads of schools, factories and hospitals in what he called "the week that changed the world".
The whole point of dialogue is mostly an end in itself because it is virtually impossible to change someone else from the outside. What the world learned repeatedly during the fall of the Iron Curtain was that when things move, they happen very quickly when compared with the scope of history; sometimes to the point where the leaders in charge find it to be unexpected.
One of the consequences of living in a post World War 2 world is that the distance that a spear can be chucked is around the entire world. That creates an imperative to at very least talk to your enemies. I think that it is better policy to try and do good for your enemies and try to understand those who hate you. You might not ever be friends but you will have moved into a state of quiet toleration. When it comes to international diplomacy though, moving to a state of mutual benefit and cooperation, even with your enemies, is better option; and while President Trump opening a dialogue with North Korea may have been done for really weird reasons, it still happened.
¹inertia - from the Greek word for laziness. Things like to keep on doing what they are already doing unless someone or something forces them to change.
²I do not know what Australia's equivalent of Air Force One³ is but I would change the registration of the diplomatic RAAF planes to VH-ROO and VH-EMU.
³Sharky One?! Really? What are you, 10 years old?
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