The mediocrity that tries to pass itself off as experts and analysts here in Finland can only offer up vitriolic laced bromides and pablum as far as N.Korea is concerned (and on anything else for that matter.) Right Charly?
The Donald Trump Negotiations Academy
We didn’t learn this week whether North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons. Only time will tell.
But we did learn that US President Donald Trump knows how to negotiate.
All of the negotiations experts insist the opposite is true. “How could they agree to a presidential summit without first guaranteeing its end product?” they sigh, knowingly.
“Trump’s showmanship is dangerous and counterproductive,” they sneer.
“At the end of the day, for this to work, Trump will have to copy Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran,” they insist.
Dennis Ross, who mediated the negotiations between Israel and the PLO that led directly to the largest Palestinian terrorism campaign against Israel in history, and Wendy Sherman, who negotiated Bill Clinton’s horrible nuclear deal with North Korea in 1994 and Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, as well as all their esteemed colleagues have taken up their pens and stood before the cameras and clucked about how Trump’s Singapore Show is amateur hour.
But what we saw in Singapore, for the first time since Ronald Reagan went to Reykjavik, was a US president who actually knew how to negotiate with America’s enemies.
Indeed, Singapore was the first time a Western leader from any nation has gotten the better of his opponent at the negotiating table.
There are three dangers inherent to the process of negotiating with enemies. And to understand how Trump succeeded where everyone since Reagan has failed, it is important to keep them in mind.
First, you have no guarantee that the other side will agree to a deal.
Trump can make the case for denuclearization to Kim. But he can’t make Kim agree to denuclearize.
Since the US has not defeated North Korea militarily, only Kim can decide whether to go along with Trump or not.
The first inherent danger of negotiating then, is that the other side walks away and – as PLO chief Yasser Arafat did in 2000 – chooses to make war instead of peace. Negotiations give credibility to the other side and may, as a consequence, make war a more attractive option for your opponent after a period of negotiations than it was when the talks began.
