SINGAPORE – As anticipation for his historic summit with North Korea has ratcheted up, salesman-in-chief Donald Trump has done something out of character: Ratcheted expectations down.
Less than two days before his tete-a-tete with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the president who initially welcomed the idea that his efforts might net him a Nobel Prize was downplaying the possibility that Tuesday’s meeting would lead to any major breakthroughs.
When asked upon landing in Singapore how he was feeling about the encounter, Trump gave a brief answer: “Very good.”
The historic event, a spectacle that has brought thousands of reporters and even basketball bad boy Dennis Rodman to the tiny South Asian country to catch a glimpse of the action, has leapfrogged decades of cautious diplomatic initiatives between Washington and Pyongyang – but in a press conference Saturday, the president declined to clarify the objective of the meeting aside from starting a conversation.
“I think the minimum would be a relationship. We’d start at least a dialogue,” Trump told reporters as he departed the G-7 summit in Quebec, Canada.
That modest vision marks a break with the stratospheric goals he set after he agreed on March 8 to this meeting. That evening, he said in a tweet that “great progress” was already being made and that denuclearization – “not just a freeze” – was on the table.
Though Trump has been criticized for his failure to demand more concessions from North Korea before agreeing to a face-to-face meeting, which experts say gives Kim the sort of legitimacy on the international stage he desires, downplaying expectations does two things. It brings the president more in line with veteran diplomats who have dealt with North Korea and know firsthand the difficulty of extracting verifiable concessions, and it helps ensure that – whatever happens on Tuesday – the president can tout it as a win.
That may be even more important to Trump in the wake of the disastrous G-7 summit. The president arrived in Asia having blown up relations with U.S. allies – and personally with French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – over trade and Russia, announcing via Twitter en route to Singapore that he’d withdraw from a joint agreement covering climate change and other issues.
But he seemed determined to keep his meeting with Kim low-key, dangling the possibility of a future summit in the U.S. if things go well this week.
The shift coincides with a shakeup on the president’s national security team – the addition of National Security Adviser John Bolton, who has been candid about his view that the North Koreans will never voluntarily give up their nuclear weapons, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former Kansas congressman with a hawkish reputation.
Bolton and Pompeo replaced two officials – H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser, and Rex Tillerson, the former national security adviser and former Secretary of State – for whom the president had little patience and whose counsel he routinely disregarded, and they have worked to impress on Trump the likelihood that negotiations with the North Koreans are likely to last months, if not years, and may end in disappointment.
Plans for the meeting nearly foundered after Trump abruptly withdrew in May, citing North Korea’s “open hostility” during negotiations.
Pompeo has disputed the notion that the president is moving the goalposts, telling reporters last Thursday that Trump “has always understood that this was a process.”
The clearest benchmarks about what the U.S. is seeking from the summit, however, have come from Pompeo rather than Trump. The Secretary of State has traveled to Pyongyang twice to meet with Kim and will participate in the Singapore talks.
He has maintained that complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization is the “only outcome” acceptable to the U.S. and that the Trump administration hopes ultimately to reach an agreement with the North Koreans that it can submit to Congress “so that when administrations do change, as they inevitably do, and this one will…that Chairman Kim will have comfort that American policy will continue down the same path.”
The president’s rhetoric has not mirrored that of his new secretary of state. Trump seemed to be working actively to define expectations downward following an Oval Office meeting last month with North Korean vice chairman Kim Yong-Chol. Trump told reporters the Singapore summit is “really a get-to-know-you kind of situation.”
“I think we’re going to have a relationship and it will start on June 12,” Trump said at the time. “We’re not going to go in and sign something on June 12 and we never were.”
It’s a dramatic departure for Trump, who kicked off 2018 bragging that his nuclear button is “much bigger” than Kim’s. He told reporters in Quebec on Saturday that he’d know “in the first minute” whether he could get to a deal with Kim, repeating that he wouldn’t waste his time – but suggested that the time he’s invested in this initial engagement wasn’t such a big deal. “The haters, they say, ‘Oh, you’re giving him a meeting,'” Trump said. “Give me a break, okay? There’s nothing.”
For all the sober-minded talk, it’s clear the art-of-the-deal president is still hoping for a major diplomatic victory.
Asked Saturday what the benchmark of success is for the summit, he said, “At a minimum, I do believe, at least we’ll have met each other. We will have seen each other. Hopefully we will have liked each other and we’ll start that process. And the maximum, I think you know the answer to that. But I think that will take a little bit of time.”
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