Reality TV with Kim

Trump Made Reality TV with Kim, So I Made a Film About It

Want to understand this farcical summit with North Korea? Use the president’s favorite medium.

By VAN JACKSON

President Donald Trump made two false claims ahead of his second planned meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un: 1) President Barack Obama intended to start a war with North Korea over its nuclear program; and 2) Trump effectively saved the Korean Peninsula from that war.

It was actually Trump, not Obama—as I explain in a recent book on the subject—who brought Washington closer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Obama publicly ruled out attacking North Korea on multiple occasions during his presidency, most pointedly in a 2015 interview when he said “in North Korea ... you’ve got a million-person army, and they have nuclear technologies, and missiles. ... So the answer’s not going to be a military solution.”

Meanwhile, after going along with the diplomacy Kim sought as part of a global charm offensive in 2018, Trump has made another kind of false claim repeatedly: that North Korea is on the road to denuclearization and that “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” In fact, North Korea had not agreed to give up its nuclear weapons, and it has not yet given any indication it’s even willing to surrender a single nuclear warhead or missile.

Trump’s gratuitous inaccuracies distort recent history, whitewash his culpability in a near nuclear disaster, and oversell what’s actually happening with North Korea. That’s why I made the documentary The Nuclear Button: How Trump and Kim Blustered to the Brink of War. Through lectures, bipartisan expert conversations and footage of Trump in his own words, The Nuclear Button paints a damning picture of an American president who inherited a dangerous situation in Korea, made it worse, and then, without explanation, began to pretend that he had solved the problem by doing nothing but meeting Kim Jong Un.

It was reality-show diplomacy, and there are three reasons that warrant labeling as such. First, Trump was driven into this summit diplomacy by his desire for media praise. Ahead of the first summit, there was ample evidence he wanted good news headlines at a time when he was plagued by scandals at home, and he seemed to admit as much publicly. Ahead of the second summit, Trump groaned about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize that Obama got even though his administration asked Japan to nominate him for one.

His motives haven’t changed. Bad motives might be forgivable if they led to good outcomes, but in this case they led Trump to adopt Kim’s preferences as his own—for instance, claiming military exercises are provocative and voluntarily suspending them, wanting to declare an end to the Korean War and remove U.S. troops from South Korea, and requiring that North Korea do little more than not test missiles or nukes.

Second, and in part because of Trump’s motives, there is no process in place to resolve the nuclear issue—even eight months after the first summit. Leader summits are inherently theatrical—they take significant planning effort, time and resources. Yet they can also be meaningful when connected to real negotiations between diplomatic professionals who reach agreements that national leaders can then consecrate through in-person meetings. Trump has jettisoned all of that, plowing ahead with the June 2018 summit in Singapore without having reached any nuclear agreements in advance or since. Planning for the second summit has actually displaced the nuclear negotiations that should have been taking place most of the past eight months since the first summit.

Third, for Trump, these summits are cheap distraction, just like reality television. The entire scope of Trump diplomacy with North Korea has changed from denuclearization and getting a grip on the North Korean nuclear threat to declaring “peace” with North Korea in spite of the underlying nuclear arsenal having become more lethal since the “fire and fury” brinkmanship of 2017. Declaring an end to a war that ended long ago is great, but nuclear stability will come only from verifiably freezing and rolling back North Korean missiles, launchers and nuclear warheads. Not its facilities or fissile material, but the weapons themselves and their delivery systems.

Yet nothing in the first summit, post-summit diplomacy, or second-summit planning has addressed North Korea’s ability to hold U.S. territory at risk of nuclear strike. That’s what matters most to Washington, and that’s what the next U.S. president is going to inherit—a nuclear situation that’s worse than when Trump came to office, and with less political space to resolve it than when Trump came to office because of the decisions being made on Trump’s watch.

Only a film can do justice to a reality show like this. There’s an absurdity in claiming diplomatic victories while actually doing nothing to reduce the vulnerability of U.S. territory to nuclear strikes—you know, the issue that made the 2017 crisis possible in the first place. That painful irony comes across better on screen—Trump’s preferred medium—than through the written word.