Hanoi Summit Failed Because Trump Refuses to Prep [View all]

[babylonsister]

Hanoi Summit Failed Because Trump Refuses to Prep
Trump hates to prepare and likes to negotiate from the gut. The Hanoi humiliation with Kim Jong Un was the direct result.
Samantha Vinograd
02.28.19 10:37 AM ET


Nothing about the Hanoi summit’s outcome is a surprise. The writing was on the wall, the president just refused to read it.

President Donald Trump’s failure to engage in the most basic preparatory work for this summit—and his longstanding penchant for putting personal convictions ahead of his experts’ opinions—meant that there was no way that he could have come out of this summit with a denuclearization deal.

I helped prep President Barack Obama for high-level meetings, and President Trump’s failure to engage in the first step of any presidential meeting prep was a strong indicator that this summit was doomed to fail.

Typically, summit prep begins with the president and his intelligence community agreeing on a baseline assessment of the state-of-play, in this case the status of North Korea’s nuclear program and Kim Jong Un’s intentions. The intelligence community’s assessment that North Korea will not denuclearize, the open-source analysis that Pyongyang is still proliferating weapons of mass destruction, and reporting that North Korea is taking extra steps to disburse its arsenal seemingly fell on deaf ears.

In January President Trump said that his intelligence community was wrong on North Korea and there’s reporting that he put more faith in Vladimir Putin’s North Korea analysis (which is never unbiased) underplaying North Korea’s missile threat than he did in the U.S. intelligence community’s analysis.

Without presidential agreement on a baseline assessment on North Korea’s program and Kim’s intentions, it was clear that President Trump couldn’t have been fully prepping with his own, home team. Absent an agreed upon assessment, there was no way to identify a realistic goal for the summit or a strategy to achieve it.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/after-the-hanoi-fail-heres-a-textbook-for-trump-summiting-for-dummies?ref=home