May 2, 2018--Let's Make A Deal

With Kim Jong-un saying last Sunday that he will give up his nuclear arsenal if Trump pledges not to invade North Korea, Kim and Trump could conclude a deal in less than half an hour. 

What else would need doing besides Trump figuring out the  theatrics of the summit meeting?

If Trump didn't require more than a day in Moscow in 2013 to run the Miss Universe Pageant, talk about a Moscow Trump Tower, and do whatever that night in Moscow's Motel 6, the situation with North Korea, thanks to Kim, is shaping up to be even more of a walk in the park.  

Of course Trump will make that pledge if that's all it takes. No need for dozens of diplomats (which we, by the way, no longer have) to work on the devils in the details. All Kim has to do is agree to having a couple of UN disarmament people resident in North Korean to make sure Kim complies. And all Trump has to do is, well, not very much. 

No need for Kim to schlep all the way to Singapore or Mongolia to meet. He doesn't have a dependable airplane to get him there anyway and the train he rides around in is so ladened with bombproofing that it can rumble along at only 22 miles per hour. He'd have to leave Pyongyang tomorrow to get to Singapore by mid May. 

To make things simple and convenient they could meet on Air Force One. Trump could fly it into Pyongyang Sunan International Airport and Kim could use an Uber to get to the meeting.

I'm making light of this because I think I may be hallucinating. I temporarily increased my meds last week and I don't trust myself these days.

But the more serious side of me senses the makings of a deal. To sign off on one there needs to be self-interest on all sides. 

And there is.

Let's start with South Korea. If we stumble into a war on the peninsular, which was feeling more and more likely just before the Olympics--remember "little rocket man" and who had the bigger nuclear button--military experts estimated that in the first half hour up to half a million Koreans would be killed. Of course, Pyongyang would be bombed back to the Stone Age and Seoul to the Iron Age, there would be no winners, very much including the global economy. So hyper-capitalistic South Korea doesn't want to go there. No more Samsung? No more Kia? No more Hyundai? 

Also, nationalist South Korean president Moon would very much like to shrug off the heavy American presence and hand, freeing his country of client statehood.

China also would like to see the U.S. less dominant in Asia. It is their goal to have us withdraw our 23,500 troops from Korea and for us to be less dominate in the regional economy. And our diminished role advances China's aspirations and worldview. 

Of course they would have to figure our a way to deal with a new Tiger Economy, millions of refugees wanting into China, and the possible unification of Korea. Korea would instantly become the new Germany and thus an economic power to reckoned with. China would have to figure out how to accommodate and/or co-opt that.

What a deal would mean to North Korea is evident. People there would have electricity and food, the roads would be fixed and Kim would have an Air Force One of his own. He also could use the money that participating in winning the Nobel Prize would provide. Perhaps for Kim, more than anything else, he would morph from pariah status to player on the world stage.

Trump too in important circles is a pariah but if he were to sign off on such a deal he would have a chance to get off that schneid. It might even help Republicans win more seats in the House of Representatives than currently projected and make it less likely that Trump would be impeached. It might also be an incentive for him to declare mission actually accomplished and decide to turn the keys over to Mike Pence.

He also could use the Nobel cash.

Kim at Pyongyang Airport