Why so much Western disdain for the Trump-Kim summit’s successes in Singapore?
Tom Plate says positive outcomes for North Korea and China in the ‘Peninsula Cup’ don’t make the US and South Korea losers, and the Western media’s reaction betrays a cold-war world view that is out of step with the geopolitical reality
Neither the leader of the United States nor the leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea remotely resembles virtue incarnate.
But virtue incarnate can be overrated – it does not always produce positive results and sometimes does the reverse. Legendary sociologist Max Weber put it this way: “The early Christians knew full well the world is governed by demons … it is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant.”
The oft-cited example is Winston Churchill (“goodness incarnate”) working with Stalin (“evil incarnate”) against Hitler (“evil beyond incarnate”). Necessity is sometimes the pushiest mother of anti-convention.
Watch: Kim commits to denuclearisation and Trump pledges security guarantees
In 1994, the stitched together Agreed Framework between the US and North Korea offered more detail than a Shanghai Metro map. Though negotiated on the US side by gifted diplomat Robert Gallucci, it collapsed after a few years amid the usual finger-pointing.
Watch: What do people in Asia think of the Trump-Kim summit
“Nobody greeted the news from Singapore with more delight than China,” concluded one prominent pundit writing in The New Yorker, airing what turned out to be almost the consensus Western perspective on the summit.
What explains the persistent pessimism? Putting aside the immense US media animosity to Trump, Western political self-confidence is, in fact, at a very low ebb. Western strategic thinking tends to quantify only win-lose outcomes, and the media reflects this binary philosophy as if in a post-cold-war trance.
This observation seems truer in the Trump era than the Obama presidency, but the march of binary melancholy is not new. This world view betrays a deep lack of respect for the complexity and priorities of other cultures and political systems.
In reality, today’s world is one vast network of codependency (environmental, economic, health). Before too long, narrow-minded practitioners of gain-loss geopolitics will find history leaving them behind.
Watch: By the numbers – the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore
China’s delight, after all, is everyone’s gain if it motivates its neighbour, North Korea, to stay a proper peaceful course. Can anyone imagine proposing a durable East Asia peace plan that China opposes? Those who knock the Singapore statement because it has Beijing’s approval must still be reading international relations textbooks half a century old. The utilitarian geopolitics of yesteryear won’t get us past tomorrow.
So, who won? Too early to say, but my best premature bet is South and possibly North Korea. A total of 76 million Koreans live on that peninsula, after all. Don’t they count?
Columnist Tom Plate, the author of the book Yo-Yo Diplomacy, is vice-president of the Pacific Century Institute and a professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles