Associated Press North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, left, and South Korean President Moon Jae-in embrace each other after signing on a joint statement at the border village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone, South Korea, Friday, April 27, 2018.
- President Donald Trump deserves some credit for the historic summit that brought together the leaders of North and South Korea.
- The president's erratic behavior and general unpredictability may have helped bring Kim to the table.
- But that same unpredictability could just as easily reverse course in the future.
It seems like a lifetime ago. But in January of this year, President Donald Trump requested that someone from Kim Jong Un's "depleted and food starved regime" inform the leader that Trump, too, had "a nuclear button, but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his," and that unlike Kim's, "my button works!"
It was hard to imagine on that day, and on any of the ones that preceded it, that Trump's predisposition toward erratic, angry outbursts might somehow lead to positive results.
But here we are, a little more than four months after this exchange, in which each leader was unsubtly threatening the other with nuclear disaster. We've progressed to a point that comes as a pleasant, welcome surprise to many foreign-policy observers.
Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea, and Kim Jong Un, North Korea's supreme leader, met Friday in a historic summit. The news has been filled with detail: where things took place, who said what to whom, what concessions have been discussed, and more.
Less space has been allocated toward exploring the extent to which the US, and Trump, is responsible for this turn of events.
In his book, "The Ends of Power," Bob Haldeman describes a conversation he had with President Richard Nixon. According to his recollections, Nixon said: "I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, 'for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry - and he has his hand on the nuclear button' and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace."
Some details are different. But swap the North Vietnamese and for the North Koreans, swap Nixon for Trump, and swap communism for nuclear weapons or "deal making," and you start to get a picture of how the president's erratic behavior might sometimes actually be an asset in foreign policy.
That said, we're at the very beginning of what will likely be a drawn out, complicated process. And we're dealing with a country that is governed by someone equally, if not more erratic, than Trump.
Writing in The New York Times, Nicholas Eberstadt, the founding director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, explained the problem.
North Korea, he wrote, "can walk away from its peace promises at any time." When that happens, "it will be able to blame whomever it wishes for this tragic result - potentially polarizing
All this is to say that Trump has far outperformed what was expected of him in the foreign-policy arena. We should celebrate that while remaining cautiously optimistic about the results that his words and deeds may yield.
As quickly as his erratic behavior became an asset, it can become a liability.