Trump vs. Kim
June 12, 2018
NOT so much two bald men fighting over a comb as two extravagantly coiffured, guffawing clowns sharing out the pomade, the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore got underway this morning.
After a few hours of sequestration in a hotel built on the remnants of a British colonial outpost, the two leaders re-appeared, Kim a nervous young badger playing second fiddle to the preposterous Foghorn Legover with his absurd blur of nicotine-coloured hair. It was very clear that both of them were expending far too much of their energy and attention trying to win a handshake contest.
“It was better than anyone could have imagined,” Trump exclaims before signing a declaration filled with vague aspirations about “working towards denuclearization” and offering safeguards to Kim’s thoroughly odious regime. This was meant to be a triumph for Trumpian diplomacy, a proof of the supremacy of chutzpah over caution, disruption over deliberation, procession over procedure. Throughout, one is reminded of what Philip Roth said about Nixon’s rapprochement with China:
You would think that the people—here, not in Orwell’s Oceania—might want their Commie-chasing President to explain to them what it is about godlessness, totalitarianism, and slavery that is less repugnant to him today than it was ten years ago, or even ten months ago.
And yet, we all keep asking ourselves: what if it works? It is impossible to resist the argument that if Barack Obama could win the Nobel Peace Prize merely by virtue of not being George W. Bush, then Donald Trump would surely deserve the same honour for the far more substantial achievement of relieving the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons.
The common assumption is that Trump’s ego is a monstrous, self-inflating bubble that is inevitably going to burst, covering the globe in its stinking bile and pus. If he does actually achieve anything, liberals the world over would be aghast.
But amid the carnival hucksterism, and quite apart from the astonishing spectacle of a sitting U.S. President shaking hands with the great helmsman of the "Hermit Kingdom", we should pause to remember that Kim’s brother was assassinated with a nerve agent at Kuala Lumpur airport just a year or two ago.
We should also spare a few thoughts for the imprisonment of Otto Warmbier, a poor American kid in the arrogant flush of youth who was sentenced to a decade of hard labour for pinching a propaganda banner, and was already as good as brain-dead when he was finally evacuated on health grounds from a DPRK gulag.
We should remember the kidnappings and the missile attacks, not to mention the drug deals and the illicit trade in WMD components. We should recall that North Korea is a barely moribund freak state, an amputated nation forged by a brutal proxy war and propped up by mass surveillance, torture and brainwashing. For the sake of a Nobel Prize, Trump might have given it a new lease of life.
