How the White House Is Spinning the North Korea Summit Collapse
It’s now known rather famously, in Donald Trump’s Twitter feed at least, as the “walk”—the president cutting short his summit in Vietnam with Kim Jong Un because, per a wisdom that fast took root back in Washington, no nuclear deal was better than a bad one.
Since the standoff in late February, however, the reasons Trump walked and where he’s headed on North Korea have remained obscure. In a classified briefing last week to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the president’s special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, dropped a number of hints—including, according to one senator who was in the room, that the administration is now placing hope for a breakthrough in the lower-level negotiations it once ridiculed. Biegun himself has since argued publicly that even though the summit didn’t yield a deal, Trump’s personal diplomacy with Kim may yet compel the North Korean leader to direct those negotiating on his behalf to reach one.
A year ago, when Trump became the first U.S. president to agree to a meeting with his North Korean counterpart, a senior administration official declared that his “great relationship” with Kim as the primary reason he will succeed where his predecessors failed, the approach has been to set a date and location for the leaders to get together and then have their deputies , rather than the other way around.
