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“Moon Should Move Fast, Before Trump‘s Scandals Overtake Him”


One of the great ironies of this year’s d?tente effort with North Korea is that South Korea‘s primary partner, the United States, is led by someone with no real interest in Korea or the US commitment to Asia. US President Donald Trump is ignorant of the most basic details of the US relationship with Korea; his interest in the issue is driven heavily by the quality of media attention he receives; he is clearly racist; he never speaks to the shared liberal democratic values of the alliance; he has castigated South Korean President Moon Jae-In as an ’appeaser‘ and claimed South Korea is free-riding on the United States; he has claimed Kim Jong Un is his friend and extolled the ’border security‘ of the inter-Korean demilitarized zone. The list of outrages goes on.

For this reason, whenever I speak to Korean audiences, I always warn that the American president is deeply unserious about Korea and d?tente, and that he will cast it aside as soon as it is politically convenient. Trump is not to be relied upon for anything serious; in his lifetime, he has cheated on his creditors, investors, bankers, wives, students, contractors, and political allies. Why would he respect Korea any more than these other actors? And this problem is about to get worse, as Trump gets investigated by the Democrats newly empowered by this month’s congressional elections.

It should be painfully apparent to anyone at this point that Trump is astonishingly unqualified to be president. He was, to be sure, an excellent campaigner. He was fantastic at riling up voters with outrageous conspiracy theories and tall tales - Obama was not born in the United States, Hillary Clinton‘s weak email security was a jailing offense, the world is ’ripping off‘ the US. He told American voters what they wanted to hear regardless of the real world cost - Americans could have tax cuts simultaneous with an expensive military build-up and infrastructure investment. Trump made no effort actually craft a serious governing program during the campaign, relying instead on his telegenic media personality to carry all before him.

And it worked. A decade in the reality television industry prepped Trump remarkably well for a political culture where much information comes to voters through TV, where appearance is reality, where policy depth or sophistication is boring and bad for viewer ratings. So Trump the astute media manipulator could get himself elected, and if I had to guess, he will be re-elected in 2020.

But his campaign skills - his ability to market himself on television - has no correlate in governing capability. Once he actually entered the White House, Trump had no idea what to do. He was immediately overwhelmed by the scale of the responsibility. When speaking of health care reform in the US, he famously said ’no one know how complicated health care was.‘ In fact, everyone with a modicum of experience in US politics knew that, because health care policy has been a thorny problem in America for decades.

In one issue area after another, Trump has proven astonishingly incapable of synthesizing or packaging complex details to the American public. On North Korea for example, despite two years of non-stop attention, Trump has never given a coherent programmatic speech to the American public on his goals regarding that country. Instead, he has swung wildly from threats of war (’fire and fury‘) to bizarre displays of affection for a tyrant Kim Jong Un (’we fell in love‘).

Similarly, Trump has struggled to find and hold quality staff. Staff turnover is in his White House has been remarkable. And many of his closest staff have struggled with accusations of corruption. On Korea, Trump took more than a year to fill out the requisite positions in the State Department, including the ambassador position at the same time he was making war threats.

This Trumpian anarchy has been very evident in the Korean case. Besides the extraordinary rhetorical swings, staffing issues, and media circus around the Singapore summit, the president and his administration still have not put forward a realistic, workable solution on North Korea. The continuing insistence on complete, verifiable irreversible disarmament (CVID) or final, fully verified disarmament (FFVD) suggest an unwillingness to admit to the US public that some manner of half/half solution is the likely outcome. If Trump were serious about North Korea, he would be giving speeches laying out possible deals to be debated with Pyongyang, such as a mix of sanctions relief in exchange for some Northern warheads, or an aid package for a missile rollback.

Those are just passing ideas. There are many possible deals, as North Korea wants much from the international community. But Trump is not floating any such possibilities, nor kicking around any swaps in public, nor making an effort to build coalitions in and across the US and South Korea around any such deal. He does not understand the issues - nuclear weapons, ballistic missile technology, inter-Korean tension - so he does not know what a workable bargain might look like, nor how to sell. Out of personal resentment at former President Barack Obama, he sank the Iran nuclear deal, which was precisely the sort of mixed, half/half bargain likely with North Korea. Instead, Trump has hyped his personal relationship with Kim Jong Un, whom he has met once for about four hours, as a (grossly inadequate) substitute for a genuine bargaining process.

All these problems will only worsen as the US Democrats take control of the House of Representatives in January 2019. They will launch sprawling investigations into Trump’s breathtaking corruption. As the sheer scale of Trumpian self-dealing becomes apparent - it will be far worse than Choi Soon Sil-gate - scandal-defense will absorb more and more of Trump‘s time and effort. A nearly completed investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign will almost certainly bring more unsavory details to light.

All this in turn will mean that Trump has little time or energy for Korean diplomacy (or anything else). The secretary of state can fill in the gap somewhat. But without focused presidential leadership, an issue as contentious as North Korea will fall into factional and bureaucratic contests in Washington. So if Moon Jae-In wants anything else serious from Trump on North Korea, now is the time to push for it. I bet that six months from now Trump will be engulfed in an epic corruption scandal back home and will drop any interest in Korea.