Hanoi Summit Failed Because Trump Refuses to Prep
Hanoi Summit Failed Because Trump Refuses to Prep
Trump hates to prepare and likes to negotiate from the gut. The Hanoi humiliation with Kim Jong Un was the direct result.
Samantha Vinograd
02.28.19 10:37 AM ET
Nothing about the Hanoi summit’s outcome is a surprise. The writing was on the wall, the president just refused to read it.
President Donald Trump’s failure to engage in the most basic preparatory work for this summit—and his longstanding penchant for putting personal convictions ahead of his experts’ opinions—meant that there was no way that he could have come out of this summit with a denuclearization deal.
I helped prep President Barack Obama for high-level meetings, and President Trump’s failure to engage in the first step of any presidential meeting prep was a strong indicator that this summit was doomed to fail.
Typically, summit prep begins with the president and his intelligence community agreeing on a baseline assessment of the state-of-play, in this case the status of North Korea’s nuclear program and Kim Jong Un’s intentions. The intelligence community’s assessment that North Korea will not denuclearize, the open-source analysis that Pyongyang is still proliferating weapons of mass destruction, and reporting that North Korea is taking extra steps to disburse its arsenal seemingly fell on deaf ears.
In January President Trump said that his intelligence community was wrong on North Korea and there’s reporting that he put more faith in Vladimir Putin’s North Korea analysis (which is never unbiased) underplaying North Korea’s missile threat than he did in the U.S. intelligence community’s analysis.
Without presidential agreement on a baseline assessment on North Korea’s program and Kim’s intentions, it was clear that President Trump couldn’t have been fully prepping with his own, home team. Absent an agreed upon assessment, there was no way to identify a realistic goal for the summit or a strategy to achieve it.
more...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/after-the-hanoi-fail-heres-a-textbook-for-trump-summiting-for-dummies?ref=home
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After spending 70-hours on a train getting there, two days in Hanoi and then 70-hours back home, Kim might just say screw the USA forever and snuggle up closer to China and Russia.
Would love to be a fly on John Kerry's or Barack Obama's wall......
I can just see Kim's tantrums on that train ride in parallel with Trump's hissy fits on AF-1.....
But, I'm sure he's got the very best communications gear China has to offer for his entertainment!
Nice summary article here:
Trump was out of his depth in Hanoi. This failure is his greatest flop yet
The blunderer-in-chief has let North Korea’s dictator emerge unscathed over his regime’s appalling human rights abuses
Simon Tisdall - The Guardian
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/28/trump-hanoi-failure-kim-advantage-north-korea-human-rights
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Trumps’s rightwing nationalistic instincts; his coddling of dictators; his cultivated ignorance of complex, sensitive international problems; and his image-driven refusal to look beyond the next news cycle, have become fixed features of his foreign policy approach.
It is this approach that has given us the appeasement of Vladimir Putin’s Russia at Europe’s expense, cut-and-run troop withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan, a dangerously obsessive vendetta against Iran, an unconscionable betrayal of the Palestinians, and a chaotic attempt to impose regime change on Venezuela.
Trump’s Hanoi bumbling follows a set pattern of unfitness. It is the very opposite of leadership. And it can only give comfort to the enemy.
As usual, Trump and right-wing media will flip the truth upside-down and declare this a huge victory!.....
He can't blame Little Kim.
I know, it's the Democrats' fault! They held that "fake" hearing and smeared him in public and Little Kim saw it and thought he would take advantage!
