The Process

Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post column today is a very good one. In it he explains why a summit between President Trump and Kim Jong Un is a good idea. I interpret this as his contribution to the complaint that’s been emerging lately that Democrats are overly negative about this meeting:

President Trump’s on-again, off-again summit with Kim has been hastily slapped together. The necessary groundwork has not been laid. The Trump administration’s stated goal — full denuclearization by North Korea — is unrealistic. Kim is said to know the intricacies of his country’s nuclear program, including its technical aspects, in great detail; Trump, by contrast, said Thursday that “I don’t think I have to prepare very much. It’s about the attitude.” Critics say the meeting itself is an enormous concession to the North Koreans, for which the United States has received exactly zero in return.

Nonetheless, I have been and remain strongly in favor of the summit. I believe there is reason to believe it will do no harm — and reason to hope it might do some good.

Put it into context. The rhetoric coming from both sides had been heating up rapidly, something that has been mitigated somewhat just by the announcement of a meeting.

North Korea, like most politically-charge situations, presents a “wicked problem”. Wicked problems have no solutions in the sense that mathematical or engineering problems do. The most that can be accomplished is that a process for addressing them can be begun. That’s what I think the proposed meeting may be.

There is one particular in which I’d quibble with Mr. Robinson. There is a way in which the meeting could do actual harm and that’s if for President Trump the meeting is a way of proving that he had exerted every effort to avoid war. Let’s think good thoughts and hope that at the very least the meeting dials down the rhetoric a bit.