This Is Bigger Than a Meeting With Kim Jong Un
“Remind me of Secretary Kerry’s visit to Tehran, or the time that Obama met with” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, John Delury, a Korea expert at Yonsei University, challenged me when we got together in Seoul in May. I couldn’t, because those things never happened. And that was precisely Delury’s point.
What Donald Trump is doing with North Korea is in fact “bolder” than what Barack Obama did with Iran, he argued. Delury disagreed with Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the nuclear agreement with Iran, and acknowledged that America’s relations with Iran are even more toxic than its relations with North Korea because Washington and Tehran are on opposing sides of conflicts across the Middle East. Still, he maintained that Obama’s “complicated, technical” deal may have been “too focused” on constraining Iran’s nuclear capabilities. “It wasn’t a deep political settlement,” he explained, whereas “what I see Trump working on with Kim Jong Un is … a fundamental transformation of the relationship.”
And what Trump is facing is nothing less than a new nuclearnow than during the Cold War, “they’re of different shapes and sizes, and they’re on different trajectories.”If the fundamental question now is the same as it was during the Cold War—how do you keep the world’s deadliest weapons from destroying the world?—the context is entirely different, and maybe that means the approach must be as well.
