Trump is being played by Kim Jong Un
By Jeffrey Lewis March 13 at 12:00 PM
Jeffrey Lewis is a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
President Donald Trump seems to think that he’s off to pick up North Korea’s stockpile of nuclear bombs. The problem is that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has said nothing of the sort. Kim thinks Trump is offering to recognize North Korea as a nuclear power. What could possibly go wrong at their upcoming meeting?
A visit between the two countries’ heads of state has been a North Korean goal for decades. It would be the ultimate symbol of recognition and, crucially for North Korea, legitimacy. In the waning months of his presidency, Bill Clinton seriously considered traveling to Pyongyang to put the finishing touches on a deal to limit North Korea’s missile programs. It didn’t work out.
Clinton of course did eventually visit North Korea in 2009, though it was to win the release of two journalists being held hostage by the regime. Footage from that trip, interestingly enough, was repurposed for the final installment of a curious series of propaganda films made by North Korea under the title “The Country I Saw.” According to the film’s narrative, Clinton traveled to North Korea because the U.S. respected North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs. Produced at the end of former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s life, “The Country I Saw” was an early indication of how North Korean propaganda would embrace the bomb as a symbol of power and legitimacy.
So when Trump agreed to a summit, he unwittingly cast himself in what may well be another installment of the propaganda series, one in which North Korea’s testing of both thermonuclear weapons and missiles that can strike the U.S. has compelled an American president to come to Kim Jong Un and recognize North Korea as a nuclear-armed power.
Trump may mock Kim as “Little Rocket Man,” but he has volunteered to give him a happy ending. Chuson Film Studios, the outfit behind “The Country I Saw,” must be blocking out scenes as we speak. And yet, North Korea has not offered to abandon its nuclear weapons — nor does it seem likely to do so. The whole process of how this visit has come about is so strange that it raises questions about whether it will really happen at all.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/03/13/trump-north-korea/?utm_term=.25b9a5a20f60
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