North Korea played Trump for a fool, just as we knew

About six months ago, participants in a Trump rally were so amazed by the President's diplomatic maneuver that allegedly convinced North Korea to suspend nuclear weapons tests that they had started chanting "Nobel! Nobel!, "Even taking President Trump by surprise (although he later claimed that" everyone thinks, "he deserved it). Shortly after, Trump met Kim Jong Un and came back to say that he had realized what the presidents had tried and failed for decades:

Well, about that …

North Korea continues its ballistic missile program in 16 hidden bases identified in new commercial satellite imagery, a long-standing network of US intelligence agencies, but not discussed as President Trump claimed to have neutralized the North's nuclear threat.

Satellite imagery suggests that the North is in great disappointment: it has proposed to dismantle a major launch site – a step started and then halted – while continuing to make improvements to more than a dozen more. Others that would strengthen conventional launcher launches. and nuclear warheads.

The existence of ballistic missile bases, which North Korea has never recognized, contradicts Trump's assertion that his historic diplomacy resulted in the elimination of a nuclear program and missiles that, according to the North, was likely to devastate the United States.

Who could have predicted that something like this would happen? Just about everyone. Except, apparently, the President of the United States. In fact, it is precisely Trump's naive vision of foreign policy that has brought us to this point.

Remember what happened at the summit in June, when the two leaders signed an agreement whereby the North Koreans promised to "work for" the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. This commitment was almost totally meaningless; as Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said at the time: "It's important to note that this is a weaker commitment to denuclearization that the regime has taken in the past. "

But the president naturally proclaimed victory. "It's defusing, I mean, it's erasing the whole place," said Trump, an assertion that was obviously false. One can only hope that Trump was lying and did not really believe that was happening.

So, this summit, which seemed so dramatic at the time, proved to be a failure. Why? Because Trump is seized by a fundamental misconception about foreign policy.

For Trump, everything is personal and everything revolves around him. He does not need to understand the history of our relations with other nations, the forces acting on an adversary or the motives of his leaders. He is the biggest negotiator in the world! He will spend in a room with the guy, use the same skills he uses to bring down the price of gold leaf wallpaper for one of his buildings and, we have reached an agreement historical bilateral.

You can see it in the way Trump talks about foreign relations. He never tries to understand where other countries come from or what they are looking for; it is all about whether they disappoint us and whether he will "hear" with the leader of another country, as if a friendly personal relationship would make everything possible. "I hope we get along well. I think we get on well together, "he said of Russian President Vladimir Putin. "We had excellent chemistry, not good, but excellent," he said of Chinese President Xi Jinping. "I liked him and he liked me a lot." A few weeks ago, he described his relationship with Kim as follows: "I was really hard, and so was he, and we were going forward, and then we fell in love. I did not really agree, he wrote me beautiful letters, and these are excellent letters, we fell in love. "

But alas, love can be ephemeral. The problem is that no matter how many beautiful letters Kim sent to Trump, the North Korean leader still considers that nuclear weapons are the key to his survival. For him, his weapons mean that no great power would dare to invade his country and destroy his regime; without them, he could end up as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, that is to say, deposed and dead.

It is essential to understand that, although Kim is a brutal dictator, this position is quite rational to take. Which means that giving up these nuclear weapons is difficult and complicated. In fact, it is possible that there is nothing we can offer him in exchange what would be attractive enough.

Trump is not the first US president to fight against North Korea's willingness to cheat and break promises, nor the first who failed to find something attractive to offer North Korea in exchange for denuclearization. But no president before him was naive enough to proclaim victory after accomplishing so little. I suppose that makes Trump's foreign policy identical to everything he does.