Today in the Death of the American Empire: Trump Hands South Korea to China

The aftermath of MAGA... ParkerDeen/ gettyimages.com

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Today, South Korea, a close ally of the United States, learned, along with the rest of the world, that Trump had cancelled that peace summit with North Korea. It was supposed to take place on June 12, in Singapore. The Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Kim Jong Un, was informed of the cancellation by a letter. In it, the President of the United States of America stated that the US would no longer participate in the negotiations because of "tremendous anger and open hostility."

The very short letter also claims the summit was "long-planned." But nothing could be further from the obvious truth. The White House's preparations for Singapore were, at best, rushed or, at worst, never amounted to much more than what appeared on Twitter. (Indeed, the current word on Twitter is that "admin officials were scheduled to meet with NoKo officials in Singapore last week" for the first time. So, they had less than a month to plan the construction of a major nuclear weapons summit.) Also, under normal circumstances, a summit of this kind is mostly symbolic. The important decisions have to be made months in advance, and all the little differences are long ironed out by nameless civil servants or foreign policy professionals.

For example, negotiations for the Iran deal that was reached in July 14, 2015 (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is its official name) really began three weeks after Hassan Rouhani became president of Iran on June 14, 2013. The whole complex business involved many rounds of talks in a number of cities. The process was long and boring. And once completed, there was no summit of the key leaders or commemorative coins or what have you.

Never mind the North Korea summit. What happened to the commemorative coin? https://t.co/dGdLGLGJHX pic.twitter.com/D6Moafi3Pj

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) May 24, 2018

President Trump was probably imagining something along the lines of The Yalta Conference , when major international treaties or agreements are usually more like the Bretton Woods Conference , whose leading figures were actually third-level government officials: John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White. The job of these men was to impress the objectives of their respective country onto the complicated negotiations. With Keynes, it was to save the remains of the British Empire by requiring that surplus countries be penalized and deceitful countries be rewarded; with White, who is one of the most fascinating Americans of his century, it was blocking all attempts to create a world currency and to make the US dollar serve that function. White easily won that conference, which initiated a period of economic growth that's named not after him, but the British opponent he defeated, Keynes (Keynesian).

What to make of Trump's summit cancellation? One, it pushed an important US ally closer to Beijing and demonstrated the US's growing incompetence in the regional arena. The amateurishness of it all will also strengthen Berlin's resolve to consolidate its position with the EU, Iran, and other key states that are managed by policy professionals and not, evidently, the former members of a former superpower. The new Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who the Foreign Policy journal calls "Mini-Trump," did not improve matters with Berlin by threatening Iran with deep and devastating sanctions. Berlin most certainly saw itself as the real target of this threat and is preparing for a showdown with the US. And Berlin knows it presently has the upper hand with Iran because the GOP cannot afford to spook the economy during election season.



Lastly, the entire international community knows that when Russia is not running the White House, Israel and Saudi Arabia are. For the former, it's by a bizarre alliance with antisemitic white American evangelical leaders whose base forms a huge part of Trump's voters. For the latter, it's by standard corruption. For different reasons, both want Iran to be run by a hardliner like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and not the current leader, Hassan Rouhani, who is a moderate.

This is something the badly informed American public does not know. Rouhani isn't an over-the-top nutter like Ahmadinejad. This is why it was impossible for any thing like the Iranian deal to happen while Ahmadinejad was in power (between 3 August 2005 and 3 August 2013). Because the political strength of the hawks in Israel is weakened by a reasonable Iran, and Saudi Arabia sees a reasonable Iran as a stronger geopolitical competitor, both states want a total madman to rule that country.

Trump would have loved Ahmadinejad. They speak a similar language. It's easy to imagine Trump writing the letter he sent to Kim Jong Un to Ahmadinejad: "You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used."