A deeper look into the Trump-Kim summit
Luck, skill, politics, and culture (and Dennis Rodman, too?)
Many a commentator has already e-spilled a great deal of digital ink on the details of the summit itself, so I have no interest in simply rehashing the same story here. Rather I would like to take a slightly different tack and discuss the less visible forces that came together in unexpected ways to create a political moment that to many seemed utterly impossible just a few months ago. I’ve narrowed down these opaque forces into the four categories of luck, skill, politics, and culture. My intent is to reveal the deeper context in which all of the pomp and pageantry to the summit played out.
The best way to describe last week’s summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un is substantive but without substance. While little was put into writing and almost no firm commitments were made, the fact that the meeting took place at all and that the summit didn’t quickly turn sour are both quite remarkable. The promises that were made were vague enough to provide fodder for critics and supporters alike — Trump opponents have denounced his offer to halt joint US-South Korea military exercises as a concession to a dictator, while Trump supporters see him fulfilling a campaign promise to scale back US military commitments abroad.
All of those debates have played out in the press at length, and this essay is not an attempt to resolve them. Rather, I’d like to dive a bit deeper into the larger context and implications of the summit itself. It is astonishing how many things had to fall into place at exactly the right moment, how many moving pieces had to turn their gears in just the right way and at just the right moment, to make this happen. Some of it was skillful diplomatic maneuvering, mostly by South Korean president Mun Jae-in, while some of it was simply blind luck. Add politics and culture, and you get a remarkably complex and unexpected moment that actually does have the potential to resolve issues that seemed completely irresolvable even a few months ago.
Luck
It was sheer luck that South Korea was hosting the winter olympics in Pyeongchang in January 2018. The announcement that South Korea had won the competition to host the winter olympics came in July 2011, and there was no reason to think it would open up the initial doors that would lead ultimately to last week’s summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. If anything, the initial approach of South Korea to winning the bid was to worry instantly about staggering security costs, fearing more than anything that North Korea would try to do something to embarrass or undermine South Korea’s moment of global sports glory. North Korea had a record of doing so, and there was no reason to think these winter olympics would be any different.
It was also sheer luck that the president of South Korea at the time of the Pyeongchang Olympics was Mun Jae-In. To understand why this was a moment of luck, you have to understand the trends in South Korean politics over the past two decades. Considering the fact that the 1953 armistice that ended hostilities between North Korea and South Korea was a ceasefire and not a peace treaty (meaning the war is not officially over), politics in South Korea has been driven mainly by security concerns, primarily the fear of renewed fighting with the North. South Korea’s turn to authoritarian rule after the Korean War was justified almost entirely by this fear. Genuine multi-party democracy did not come to South Korea really until the 1990s.
I mention this because it was not until the presidency of Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003) that South Korea decided to pursue an entirely different approach to relations with the North, one based not on hostility and confrontation but on gentle diplomatic suasion and trust-building initiatives. This approach was referred to as the “Sunshine Policy” (햇볕 정책), for which Kim Dae-jung was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000. Kim Dae-jung’s successor, Noh Moo-hyun (2003–2008), continued the Sunshine Policy approach, but by the end of Noh’s term as president, many South Koreans were beginning to feel that the Sunshine Policy had failed, and the trust shown by the South toward the North was not being reciprocated. Indeed, North Korea was accused of taking advantage of the South’s kindness to allocate even more resources to the expansion of its military and in particular, its nuclear program and missile delivery systems. As a result, South Koreans elected conservative hard-liner I Myung-bak as president (2008–2013), effectively ending the Sunshine Policy era and reinstating a confrontational stance against the North. It was during I Myung-bak’s presidency that South Korea won its bid for the winter olympics, so again, there was no reason to think of anything other than security costs and concerns when the winning bid was announced.
I Myung-bak was followed by Park Geun-hye (2013–2017), who was the daughter of former autocratic leader Park Chung-hee (1963–1979). Park Chung-hee had himself survived two dramatic assassination attempts by North Korean agents, one in 1968 and one in 1974 (in the latter, his wife, Yuk Young-Soo, was killed). North Korea was none-too-thrilled by the election of Park Geun-hye, who was in many ways symbolic of strained relations with the North and who could understandably be seen as someone with an axe to grind. As it turns out, however, Park Geun-hye’s term as president quickly became bogged down in a number of scandals, for which she was eventually impeached and removed from office in 2017. Had all of that been happening during the winter olympics, there would never have been a Trump-Kim summit.
All of this brings me back to the point of why it was a such a moment of great luck that Mun Jae-in was president when that other moment of great luck, the hosting of the winter olympics in Pyeongchang, was happening. After nearly a decade of either open hostility toward the North (I Myung-bak) or breathtaking ineffectiveness and scandal (Park Geun-hye), South Koreans were ready for a new start, and they certainly got one with Mun Jae-in. Mun Jae-in had campaigned on the promise of a return to the Sunshine Policy approach, and knowing how frustrated South Koreans were with the inaction of Park Geun-hye’s administration, wanted to show resolve and decisive action as soon as he assumed office. The winter olympics could not have come at a more opportune time to do exactly that.
It was also sheer luck that Kim Jong-un had successfully and effectively established himself as undisputed leader of North Korea by the time the winter olympics rolled around. Kim came to power at an unusually young age, succeeding his father, Kim Jong-il, who died in 2011. Kim Jong-un’s young age, along with the fact that he was not the eldest son but rather the youngest, meant that he had to prove that he deserved to inherit the position, which he did through a number of flagrantly provocative attacks against the South, along with a number of brutal executions of anyone he felt was a threat to his power within North Korea (including that of his own uncle, Jang Song-Thaek, in 2013). There was also the assassination of Kim Jong-nam in Malaysia in 2017, widely believed to have been ordered by Kim Jong-un. Kim Jong-nam was Kim Jong-il’s first born son and should have inherited the throne, so to speak, which would have happened had he not disgraced himself with a buffoonish attempt to sneak into Japan in 2001 in an effort to visit Tokyo Disneyland.
The last bit of luck I have to mention — and apologies in advance because I know this will sting — is that Donald Trump was the president of the United States. Trump’s approach of “do the opposite” of what everyone else might or should do actually worked in the right direction in this moment, again, largely by luck. Considering that previous presidents from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama absolutely refused to meet with any leader of North Korea — and remember, it was George W. Bush who referred to North Korea as part of the “Axis of Evil” — Donald Trump was exactly the type of person who couldn’t resist the opportunity to do what no one else would do. I’m not saying that’s a good quality to have as a head of state — I’m simply saying that in this specific instance, it opened up the possibility for the summit to happen, which it did.
Skill
Luck is only part of the story, however, and the Trump-Kim summit would never have happened without at least some modicum of diplomatic skill to take advantage of the fortuitous confluence of so many things. The one person in the entire process that really seems to deserve the title of mastermind is none other than President Mun Jae-in. It’s worth taking a moment to understand exactly what contribution Mun Jae-in made in all of this, because his efforts were absolutely indispensable, and from a diplomatic standpoint, quite brilliant.
The first thing Mun Jae-in did was to recognize the incredible opportunity given to him by the winter olympics in Pyeongchang, and more importantly, to capitalize on that opportunity with extraordinarily impressive tact and skill. Here are two examples that demonstrate exactly what I’m talking about.
At a time when the American press was (and still is) falling over itself to throw shade on Ivanka Trump, Mun Jae-in welcomed her to the olympics and treated her with absolute courtesy and respect. In doing so, he was indirectly offering his own respect to Donald Trump, as both a president and a father. American audiences might have bristled at the sight, but South Korean audiences would have seen it as a very intentional and graceful gesture (see also the culture section, below).
More importantly, perhaps, was that with the arrival at the olympics of Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, Mun Jae-in treated her with absolutely the same level of courtesy and respect that he showed to Ivanka Trump. This again was a very intentional gesture, as it sent a message that President Mun saw them both as equally honored guests. North Korea has long been incensed at its perceived unequal treatment in the world, and Mun Jae-in’s social and diplomatic graces in this case generated precisely the kind of trust that started to open the way toward the Trump-Kim summit.
The second thing Mun Jae-in did that showed an well-honed ability to do the right thing at the right time was to give credit to Trump’s “hard-line” approach toward North Korea for creating the opening in North-South relations in the lead-up to the olympics. Trump’s opponents in the US nearly vomited with rage over this, but they missed the intention of Mun Jae-in when he made this statement and offered his praise and gratitude to Trump. Mun Jae-in knew that Trump thrived on praise and valued expressions of loyalty, and in offering his thanks to Trump for opening the door to North-South dialog, he was giving Trump exactly what Trump wanted. Keep in mind that it doesn’t matter whether or not Mun Jae-in actually thought it was true. What mattered was that it was a brilliant tactical and diplomatic move that insured that the US would be on board and more importantly, would not try to jeopardize efforts at North-South rapprochement as Mun Jae-in stepped up his game.
I would also be remiss in my duties, and I know this won’t go down well with some (or many), but I also have to acknowledge the skill of Kim Jong-un. No, I’m not overlooking or excusing the excessive brutality of the North Korean regime, but for a country that is known for being completely out of touch with pretty much the entire world, Kim Jong-un revealed a surprising capacity to read the situation well and put on a charm offensive of his own. In a strange way, his efforts harkened back to the efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s to get the world to see the Soviet Union differently, even as Gorbachev tried desperately to save the Soviet system (which turned out to be beyond hope with any effort at reform).
Politics
At the end of the day, any summit is infused with politics, and this one had politics galore. Let’s start with the question of Why Singapore?
For anyone who has ever visited Singapore, it probably seemed like the most efficient country in the world, a veritable well-functioning utopia that enjoys political stability and low levels of corruption. But Singapore, which has been ruled by the same party since independence in 1965 (but is in fact a democracy), isn’t necessarily perfect, and a few cracks in the otherwise flawless facade have appeared in recent years. One of the issues that Singapore has been grappling with, for instance, is its egregious lack of what political science-types like to call soft power — basically the cultural calling card that a country can show to the rest of the world (think K-pop in South Korea). Everyone knows that Singapore is a great place to do business, but just try to answer any of the following questions: What’s your favorite Singaporean band? What’s your favorite Singaporean movie? What’s your favorite Singaporean dish? My guess is that you are drawing blanks at this point, unless of course you are from Singapore or have spent a lot of time there.
Nordic countries are well-known for their diplomatic prowess — it’s not by accident that so many peace negotiations happen there — and that type of diplomatic prowess is also considered to be a good example of soft power. Singapore is well aware of this, and so Singapore made very good use of this moment to showcase their capacity to be a key diplomatic player. They were as courteous and gracious to Kim Jong-un and his entourage as they were to Trump’s, and their ability to offer top-notch security and first-rate services to ensure that everything went smoothly was certainly on display. Singapore has something of a reputation for being less-than-diplomatic in the context of Southeast Asia, with other countries often seeing it as arrogant and aloof, so the summit was also an opportunity to show its neighbors that it knows the good graces of proper diplomacy.
Singapore, along with all the rest of Southeast Asia, also couldn’t be happier to be at the forefront of Asian politics for a change, since most of the headlines coming out of Asia are dominated by China and India first, and then Japan and the two Koreas second. There has been considerable tension between most of Southeast Asia and China in recent years over the disputed territories in the West Philippine (aka South China) Sea, so the chance to upstage China and be the focus of attention also fueled Singapore’s desire to show the world it could pull off this summit flawlessly, which it did.
In the United States, aside from Trump’s personal predilection to do whatever he is told he can’t do, there is the larger desire of the Republicans to upstage the Democrats in the run-up to the interim elections. The Democrats had the opportunity to create a non-nuclear North Korea back when Bill Clinton was president, through what was referred to as the Agreed Framework set up in 1994. The agreed framework in essence offered heavily subsidized supplies of energy resources in exchange for building a light-water nuclear reactor for North Korea, one which would be incapable of producing radioactive by-products that could be refined into weapons-grade nuclear materials. The agreement fell apart as mutual accusations of not acting in good faith piled up, and within just a few years the agreement was as good as dead. If the Republicans can avoid falling into the same problematic patterns, they might be able to pull off what the Democrats couldn’t seem to do when they had the chance.
Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all intentionally refused to speak directly and officially with North Korea, at least at the head-of-state level, mostly to avoid giving the North Korean regime the legitimacy and respect it desired. In this sense, Trump can certainly claim a first. For those who might criticize Trump for talking with an unspeakably brutal dictator, however, we have to remember that though head-of-state level talks never happened until this most recent summit, there had always been efforts to hold talks with North Korea, and Bill Clinton did send Madeleine Albright to North Korea as Secretary of State to meet with Kim Jong-il in 2000. Little was accomplished in that meeting, though to the consternation and amusement of many, Albright and Kim Jong-il seemed to hit it off quite well together.
Culture
The last element to bring into play here is culture, because it plays a much more important role than many might think in relation to the summit.
First off we have diplomatic culture, which of course was on flagrant display for the summit. Things that in other moments would be simply awkward social moments can take on great significance — witness Donald Trump’s saluting a North Korean general after first trying to shake his hand. Since Trump is technically the commander-and-chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, this was a gesture of considerable respect, one that had some commentators outraged and others perplexed. It played out very well to a North Korean audience, however.
Similarly, smiles were an important diplomatic gesture. Anyone who has seen the pictures of Bill Clinton in North Korea (not as president) on a humanitarian mission to secure the release of two American journalists knows that he and his entire entourage went out of their way not to smile. This was meant as an intentional gesture to reflect the seriousness of the mission and to deny Kim Jong-il a propaganda victory by showing him hobnobbing with his (former) American counterpart. This contrasts sharply with Trump’s abundant smiles from the very first moment he and Kim Jong-un met.
In terms of what is often called Track Two diplomacy (informal diplomatic gestures by unofficial actors), the biggest winner here would of course be Dennis Rodman. Watching Dennis Rodman gloat as he trash-talked Obama and praised Trump no doubt grated painfully on the nerves of many, but Rodman’s informal efforts do have to be recognized in playing some sort of role in helping to pave the long road to get to this summit. In many ways, it could only be someone like Rodman who could have made inroads to Kim Jong-un in order to get Kim to see Americans differently. Rodman’s outsider status and shall we say rather unorthodox appearance made him more palatable to a North Korean audience—Rodman might be the clear winner in the “person most likely not to appear like an imperialist” category)—and both his love for basketball and his outsider status would have resonated favorably with Kim Jong-un.
Lastly, I have to talk about Korean culture, which plays a somewhat surprising role here for those unfamiliar with it. Many observers have pointed out how unexpected this summit was, given that it was only last September that Trump was standing in front of the General Assembly at the United Nations talking about Kim Jong-un as “rocket man.” Many a night-show host had many a laugh with Trump’s over-the top rhetoric about Kim Jong-un and North Korea, noting that it’s never a good approach to deal with a crazy dictator by emulating the language and antics of said crazy dictator.
Yet, here we have to return to the praise that Mun Jae-in gave to Donald Trump for bringing Kim Jong-un to the negotiating table, especially the part where Mun Jae-in praised Trump’s “hard-line approach” toward North Korea. Why would Mun Jae-in say this? As I said previously, one of the reasons for this is that Mun Jae-in was being brilliantly diplomatic, giving Trump exactly what Mun knew Trump liked to get (praise). But there is another reason why Mun Jae-in would have said this, and here you’re going to have to hold on to your hat when I say this, and that reason is that from a Korean cultural perspective, Trump’s behavior may have been precisely the most effective way to deal with North Korea.
Let me say up front that in saying that, I am not attributing to Trump some sort of erudite cultural awareness of the ways of the world. This clearly falls into the “happy accident” category, meaning it was unintentional but possibly successful in producing the desired result. Let me explain what I mean by this.
Like many cultures in Asia, and perhaps to a greater degree, Korean culture highly values conformity, restraint, and humility, the latter in many ways being itself a form of restraint. One corollary of this is that once you have crossed outside the lines of acceptable normative behavior, you have every incentive to be as extreme as possible once you are out there, in order to call attention to the rightness of your action in violating social and cultural norms. There is a brutal emotional logic to this, one that trumps (pun intended) any appeal to rational logic. An extreme emotional reaction to someone else’s behavior puts the focus not on whether the emotionally distraught person is right, but rather on just how wrong the other person is. There is mutuality of wills here that tends to ratchet up the emotional level of any dispute, as seen in Korean phrases often deployed in heated moments such as “You die, I die!” (니 죽고 내 죽자).
In Western culture, we have the idea of appealing to calmness through measured, rational reasoning, in order to resolve the conflict (“let cooler minds prevail”). In Korean culture, however, a cool and reasoned response could be seen as an admission of wrongness or guilt, since clearly you have nothing to defend and so are deploying a diversionary tactic. So in a very, very strange way, Trump’s matching and then outdoing of Kim Jong-un’s already irrational rhetoric may have been precisely the right response. Obama’s cool and calm response of “I won’t even dignify that with an answer” is exactly what an American audience would expect as the proper demeanor, but in a Korean context, it would be seen quite differently. Trump’s “my nuclear button is bigger than yours” is precisely the sort of “you die, I die” type of rhetoric that might have shown Kim Jong-un that Trump meant serious business. Add to that the North Korean saying, “a boneless tongue breaks bones” (뼈 없는 혀가 뼈 를 부순다), which could not be more different from the English “sticks and stones” response, and suddenly we begin to understand from another angle why Mun Jae-in would have credited Trump’s rhetorical response as being precisely the thing that brought North Korea to the negotiating table.
To bring all of this to a close, I will say something about how all of this will play out in the coming months, and will rely one more time on Korea cultural values. Remember that Korean culture values conformity, as well as humility and restraint. Trump has a decided tendency to act and speak with a sort of reckless bravado that reeks of arrogance and narcissism, something that in most contexts does not play out well to a Korean audience. Conformity as mutuality gives us the idea often referred to as “face,” which can be interpreted as allowing someone a graceful exit from an awkward or unpleasant situation in a way that does not require a crossing of culturally normative codes of behavior. If Trump begins to make boastful claims about how he forced Kim Jong-un to do something, or if Trump takes credit for saving the day, Kim Jong-un will have no choice but to respond in ways that will seem irrational and over-the-top. So the question is, how long can Trump maintain the goodwill generated by the summit, and not poison things with a return to a barrage of disrespectful, arrogant language? That more than anything is the greatest threat to the possibility of achieving a denuclearized Korean peninsula, and giving the people of both Koreas what they have so dearly wanted for well over half a century — a sense of peace.
