VIETNAM has revoked the visa of a look-alike of the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un who last week held an impromptu “summit” with a Donald Trump impersonator in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi, where there real Trump and Kim are due to hold their second summit talks starting on Wednesday.
The Vietnamese authorities stand accused of a sense of humor failure in deporting Australian-Chinese impersonator Howard X who first hit the headlines last year when he danced in front of North Korean cheerleaders at the Seoul Winter Olympics. It is unclear if Russell White, the Canadian who pretended to be Donald Trump has also been given his marching orders by the Hanoi government. But in any event, the shenanigans of this pair are being taken by some commentators as a metaphor for the Trump-Kim summit, in that they see it itself as a joke.
The US president has a vocal cohort of political and media enemies back home who treat his every pronouncement with visceral contempt. Yet this is to ignore that successive US administrations failed to get beyond first base in negotiations with the hermit North Korean regime and its unpredictable Kim family leaders. Trump’s first meeting with Kim Jong Un in Singapore was a diplomatic coup, even though each leader appeared to take away from the talks notably different views of the outcome. North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weaponry, supplemented by the apparent ability to deliver deadly warheads at least as far as the US West Coast, followed a carefully measured path of confrontation. The basic calculation has always been that by joining the atomic weapons club, Pyongyang made itself invulnerable to outside attack.
It follows that for Kim to abandon his nuclear arsenal and the rocketry to fire it would require the sort of cast-iron guarantees that would allow his regime to carry on. From the very foundation of this Communist state, in 1948 by occupying Soviet troops, the regime’s key policy has been that the economy must to be focused on defense against South Korea beyond the 38th parallel that divides the country, and Seoul’s allies, principally the United States. Thus Pyongyang has approaching 9.5 million people, some 38 percent of its population, under arms, either as reservists, paramilitaries or members of its full-time armed forces of 1.21 million, the fourth largest in the world.
If Kim agrees to dismantle his nuclear defenses, he will want China and perhaps also Russia, which has a small border with North Korea to protect it. In return the United States would have to agree to remove, at the very least, its battlefield nuclear weapons from South Korea and ultimately pull out its remaining 28,500 troops. For that to happen would require international guarantees for South Korea as well.
Such a deal is fraught with risks and complications, the largest of which has been Pyongyang’s proven slipperiness and willingness to welch on past agreements. Kim Jong Un has reached his current level of international power by being consistently confrontational. It was only when he came up against the no-less confrontational Donald Trump, that a negotiated deal became a possibility. Those in the States who are hoping their president will be humiliated in Singapore should ask themselves if they really do not want a solution to this enduring and frankly terrifying geopolitical standoff
