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And, even more so, there were these: “If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him,” Trump told Bloomberg News, “I would absolutely, I would be honoured to do it.”

Wow, says an astonished world: What if?

In the annals of diplomatic history, such a tete-a-tete, unlikely as it is, would tumble into a category that offers few possible comparisons.

There are the ones that never happened — Roosevelt sitting down with Hitler during World War II, George Bush (whichever one) facing Saddam Hussein while in office. And there are those that did: Kennedy meeting Khrushchev in Vienna, Nixon arriving in Beijing at the dawn of the U.S.-China thaw and immediately heading to a meeting with Mao.

Even those, however, were before many things we take for granted today — perhaps most notably the internet, live television and the instantaneous social-media pipelines that Trump knows and uses so fluidly.

The notion of a substantive sit-down between two of the most gazed-upon figures of this moment in the planet’s history is a staggering prospect — and a potential logistical nightmare if the two countries ever tried to make it happen.

Presuming that such a trial balloon is to be taken seriously, what, in fact, would it take to pull off? The loose contours of it could play out as follows:



THE VENUE

Possible locations could include the DMZ, which would be about as cinematic a piece of drama as human geopolitics could offer up, with a room featuring negotiation tables that sit halfway in the North and halfway in the South.