Donald Trump, deal-breaker in chief North Korea summit joins the art of the deal-breaking list of Paris climate accord, TPP, Iran nuclear deal, NAFTA, DACA: Our view

The Editorial Board | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption President Trump cancels North Korea summit President Donald Trump calls the summit's cancellation a "tremendous setback" for North Korea and the world.

Thursday's collapse of a highly anticipated nuclear summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is a stark and disturbing reminder of the chasm between what the president says he can do and reality.

Trump sold himself to voters as the great negotiator, the ultimate problem-solver. "I alone can fix it," he said in his acceptance remarks at the Republican convention about rigged systems.

The pitch worked. Supporters rightly fed up with years of congressional gridlock and a declining manufacturing base were certain that Trump would make great deals. Was he not, after all, the billionaire real estate wheeler-dealer whose name was synonymous with gold-plated success?

OPPOSING VIEW: Donald Trump is onto something

But after 16 months as president, Trump has shown himself less talented at making new deals than at breaking existing ones. The list of broken or endangered agreements keeps growing: The Paris climate accord. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. The Iran nuclear deal. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy.

In other words, Trump's pretty good at deal-breaking. It's deal-making where he stumbles:

►Even as he pulled out of an agreement preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb, Trump pushed for an even more ironclad deal stripping North Korea of the same weapons. As enticements, he promised Kim major U.S. investments ("His country will be rich") and safety and security ("He will be happy") — strange offerings for a dictator who operates one of the world's last, brutal gulag systems, imprisoning tens of thousands.

On Thursday, the same day North Korea said it blew up a nuclear test site, Trump blew up the summit planned for June 12 in Singapore. He was evidently upset about renewed, tough, rhetoric emanating from Pyongyang.

Walking away from the table can be an effective negotiating technique. Trump's abrupt decision to cancel the meeting, however, throws into turmoil hopes of denuclearizing North Korea after a year of painstakingly assembling the toughest sanctions against the regime. It also provides more support for the idea that major diplomatic breakthroughs are best achieved after months or even years of lower-level negotiations and commitments, with a summit reached at the end of the process.

Will the summit get rescheduled? To paraphrase the president, maybe it will, maybe it won't. Who knows? All that's certain is that the giddy Nobel prize talk was premature.

►A similar pattern has played out on trade issues. Trump made campaign hay out of America's trade deficit with China, correctly citing Beijing's large-scale industrial subsidies and intellectual property appropriation as unfair practices. But he inexplicably withdrew the United States from the TPP, a multilateral agreement that excluded China and could have isolated Beijing on trade, forcing reform.

In its place, Trump threatened tariffs and a trade war, which has yielded little but vague promises from China. After a second round of talks led by a bickering team of U.S. negotiators, China said it would reduce the U.S. trade deficit and safeguard intellectual property, as well as make some modest cuts in auto import tariffs, a move more beneficial to German car makers and Chinese consumers than the United States. "There is no deal," Trump conceded Tuesday, later tweeting how deal-making was truly hard.

Closer to home, Trump's efforts to renegotiate NAFTA with Canada and Mexico, again with threats of tariffs, have yet to succeed and will likely carry over to next year. And speaking of our neighbor to the south, whatever happened to that deal to get Mexico to pay for the proposed border wall?

Trump's deal-making failures would be almost comical if the stakes weren't so high. As anyone who has watched a bully on the beach knows, knocking down sand castles is easy. Building them is hard work.

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