{"id":135164,"date":"2018-03-12T08:00:27","date_gmt":"2018-03-12T12:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=135164"},"modified":"2018-03-22T14:14:53","modified_gmt":"2018-03-22T18:14:53","slug":"trump-know-kim-jong-un","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2018\/03\/trump-know-kim-jong-un\/","title":{"rendered":"What Trump Should Know About Kim Jong Un"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kim Jong Un is a \u201csmart cookie,\u201d President Donald Trump\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0of North Korea\u2019s leader in April 2017.<\/p>\n

Smart enough, it seems, to merit\u00a0a face-to-face meeting<\/a>. President Trump\u2019s acceptance of Kim\u2019s invitation to discuss North Korean denuclearization is a stunning move that\u00a0some have greeted<\/a>\u00a0as a potential breakthrough, and others have decried as a\u00a0massive risk<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If he does indeed meet with Kim, Trump will need to understand what makes the North Korean leader tick. Finding the answer to this vital question will require figuring out how the North Korean leader sees the world.<\/p>\n

Although Trump will be the first sitting U.S. president to meet with a North Korean leader, he will be far from the first president to try to understand a foreign statesperson. As was the case with figures such as Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Nikita Khrushchev, figuring out a dangerous international interlocutor is once again an urgent national security challenge.<\/p>\n

Are there lessons from the past that can help President Trump as he prepares to meet Kim?<\/p>\n

Lessons of the past<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the spring of 1943, the director of the first centralized U.S. intelligence agency, Colonel William \u201cWild Bill\u201d Donovan,\u00a0sought help<\/a>\u00a0in understanding Hitler. Donovan wanted to give President Franklin D. Roosevelt a sense of \u201cthe things that make him tick.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donovan called Walter C. Langer, a psychoanalyst helping with the war effort, in for a meeting and asked: \u201cWhat do you make of Hitler? If Hitler is running the show, what kind of a person is he? What are his ambitions?\u201d<\/p>\n

Langer combined the scant intelligence on Hitler with insights from Freudian psychoanalysis into a\u00a0study on Hitler<\/a>. He accurately predicted that Hitler would commit suicide rather than be captured by Allied forces. But his insight was largely irrelevant to the military strategy for defeating Germany. The report took so long to produce that the war was nearly over by the time it was delivered to Donovan.<\/p>\n

More recently, the former top\u00a0U.N. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer and I studied<\/a>\u00a0what made former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein tick. For several years, Duelfer was the senior point of contact between Iraq and the U.S. After the regime fell, he produced the definitive\u00a0report on its weapon program<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Looking for logic in Saddam\u2019s decisions, we found instead a morass of idiosyncratic thinking. Most astonishing was his misreading of\u00a0President George W. Bush\u2019s June 2002 speech<\/a>\u00a0to the West Point Military Academy. Intending to warn Saddam that he must comply with U.N. demands or face war, Bush struck a stern tone. The \u201cgravest danger to freedom,\u201d he said, was \u201cunbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction.\u201d Later in the speech, Bush praised President Ronald Reagan for standing up to \u201cthe brutality of tyrants.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Bush said and what Saddam heard were\u00a0two very different things<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Saddam did not see himself as unbalanced, and he knew that he did not have weapons of mass destruction. And U.S.-Iraq relations had been excellent under President Reagan, Saddam recalled. The United States had tilted toward his side during the Iran-Iraq war. Things started to deteriorate only under the Bushes, in his view.<\/p>\n

Our analysis showed that Saddam believed Bush could not have been talking about him. Instead, Saddam concluded he must have been threatening North Korea, not Iraq. Kim Jong Il, father of Kim Jong Un, possessed the nuclear weapons that the Iraqi president desired but did not have.<\/p>\n

Bush was dumbfounded by the lack of Saddam\u2019s response to his threats. Later\u00a0he asked<\/a>, \u201cHow much clearer could I have been?\u201d<\/p>\n

Duelfer and I had the academic luxury of malleable deadlines in studying Saddam. Langer spent many months on his Hitler study. Scholarship on Kim Jong Un may be too slow for the current crisis.<\/p>\n

Major American decision-makers may instead need to rely on their intuition.<\/p>\n

Empathize with your enemy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara spoke about intuition in a 2003\u00a0documentary<\/a>\u00a0about his role in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. McNamara revealed crucial new details about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had smuggled nuclear missiles into Cuba, threatening 90 million Americans. President John F. Kennedy\u2019s first reaction was that he must destroy them with a massive air strike. This would have courted war with the USSR.<\/p>\n

Seeking the widest possible range of advice, Kennedy asked Llewellyn \u201cTommy\u201d Thompson, former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, to supplement his foreign policy team during the crisis. Thompson had come to know Khrushchev well and had stayed at his house in Moscow.<\/p>\n

\u201cMr. President, you\u2019re wrong,\u201d McNamara recalls Thompson saying of the air strike plans. \u201cI think Khrushchev\u2019s gotten himself in one hell of a fix.\u201d The former ambassador knew that Khrushchev could be impulsive and later regretful. He imagined a terrified Khrushchev, in awe of the events he had set in motion. Thompson suggested that Kennedy help the Soviet leader find his way out of the crisis. Kennedy decided on a naval blockade rather than an air strike, and Khrushchev backed down.<\/p>\n

The lesson McNamara drew? Empathize with your enemy, and intuit how the world looks to them. \u201cWe must try to put ourselves in their skin, and look at ourselves through their eyes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Turning to today\u2019s crisis, Trump will have to reckon with several uncomfortable facts. The Kim dynasty has invested decades of effort in their pursuit of nuclear weapons; it is unlikely that they will negotiate them away. Further, Trump must recognize that by meeting with Kim, he is giving the North Koreans\u00a0something they have long sought<\/a>: to be dealt with as diplomatic equals.<\/p>\n

With the president\u2019s dearest hope off the table, and with the meeting itself already representing a win for the North Koreans, what is it that Trump can realistically expect to gain from talks? He and his staff will have to think about how they might cajole and persuade Kim to agree to things the U.S. values, such as a permanent freeze on further missile and nuclear tests.<\/p>\n

History tells us that to influence Kim, we must empathize (note: not sympathize) with him. If the meeting is to be a success, Trump and his advisers must first understand how we look to the North Korean leader, peering at us from his very particular vantage point.<\/p>\n

Originally published in The Conversation<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘If he does indeed meet with Kim Jong Un, President Trump will need to understand what makes the North Korean leader tick,’ says political scientist Stephen Dyson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":125718,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,88,2225],"tags":[2078],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[175],"class_list":["post-135164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-global-affairs","category-uconn-storrs","tag-political-science"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-18 23:17:07","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135164"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135672,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135164\/revisions\/135672"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/125718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135164"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=135164"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=135164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}