Simon Tisdall - The art of no deal: how Trump and Kim misread each other
Trump’s inability to
lay a diplomatic glove on Kim in the Hanoi rematch also means North Korea’s
dictator has again emerged unscathed over his regime’s appalling human rights
abuses. When it suits him, Trump is quick to use human rights as a stick to
beat governments in Iran or Venezuela. In his 2018 State of the Union address, before he got chummy with Kim,
Trump declared: “No regime has oppressed its own citizens more totally or
brutally than the cruel dictatorship in North Korea.”
Trump was right, or at
least his speechwriter was. Kim presides over a gulag of forced labour camps of
appalling inhumanity. North Koreans are subject to arbitrary arrest, torture and indefinite incarceration without
trial. The regime’s corrupt and incompetent economic management has caused mass
starvation. Yet in Hanoi, his
confected fury forgotten, Trump made no mention of these ongoing abuses, nor
did he try to do anything to curb them.
When asked about an American student,
Otto Warmbier, who was mistreated in a North Korean prison and later
died, he absolved Kim of responsibility. Kim, he said, “felt badly” but
“didn’t know about it”. It was another Khashoggi moment – and similarly stomach-turning. Trumps’s rightwing nationalistic
instincts; his coddling of dictators; his cultivated ignorance of complex,
sensitive international problems; and his image-driven refusal to look beyond
the next news cycle, have become fixed features of his foreign policy approach.
It is this approach
that has given us the appeasement of Vladimir Putin’s Russia at Europe’s
expense, cut-and-run troop withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan, a
dangerously obsessive vendetta against Iran, an unconscionable betrayal of the
Palestinians, and a chaotic attempt to impose regime change on Venezuela... read more
