After President Donald Trump’s surprise announcement on Thursday that he had agreed to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, some conservatives wondered why they were abandoning the position they took with President Barack Obama.

Obama’s comments in 2008 and 2009 about talking to strongmen “without preconditions,” and his efforts to work with both North Korea and Cuba’s communist governments, were greeted by conservatives with scorn. So it seemed odd to some on the right that Trump doing the same was being feted as a victory for American foreign policy.

“I’m not certain why meeting with Kim without preconditions is suddenly a grand coup when we would have gone nuts had Obama done the same,” said conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, who criticized Obama back in 2009 and is now often critical of Trump.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty wondered the same. “Remember how much we condemned then-senator Barack Obama’s pledge to ‘meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?’ That wasn’t wrong,” Geraghty wrote.

It’s unclear what Trump’s meeting will consist of, or what it means for America’s foreign policy strategy with regards to North Korea — since last night’s announcement, the administration has walked back some of Trump’s statements and tried to make it clear that the meeting, scheduled to perhaps take place before May, should not be read as a negotiation or an agreement, or a move toward demilitarization on the Korean Peninsula.

While some Republicans are giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, Trump is also keeping up his recent streak of riling up his allies, whether it’s on guns or tariffs or, now, North Korea.

Why conservatives don’t like meetings with strongmen

Shapiro told me that by Trump agreeing to meet with Kim, North Korea had already achieved a victory. “Kim is looking for legitimacy; Trump just gave it to him as a presumed co-equal on the world stage.” He added, “If Trump is the greatest dealmaker ever, then I’m sure everything will be fantastic! But I have some pretty serious doubts, obviously.”

Other conservatives are concerned it just won’t work, arguing that North Korea has a long history of entering into negotiations that come “tantalizingly close” to an arms agreement before backing away.

Tom Nichols, a conservative writer and a professor at the US Naval College, told me that Trump’s reality television “dealmaking” experience won’t matter here. “The president’s faith in his own dealmaking is a quintessentially American view, but it presumes that the other guy is interested in a deal,” Nichols told me. “The North Koreans are interested in North Korea, not in a showcasing a ‘deal,’ and if the president walks into this assuming that Kim Jong Un wants a deal, he’s going to be unpleasantly surprised.”

In an op-ed for USA Today, Nichols wrote that there’s a far better chance of total “disaster” than a Nobel Prize for Trump, given the North Korean diplomatic tradition of, in Nichols’s terms, “bait-and-switch.” “Most likely,” rather than a stirring success for the Trump administration, Nichols said, “the White House is about to walk right into a trap the North Koreans have been laying for American presidents since the 1990s.”

It’s especially odd that some on the right are applauding Trump’s willingness to meet with Kim, given their previous statements on Obama’s efforts to meet with intransigent foreign powers said that it was “troubling.”

In 2008, National Review’s William J. Bennett wrote, “Barack Obama’s position on negotiating with U.S. enemies betrays a profound misreading of history,” adding that if Obama were to meet with Iranian officials, “he will lower the prestige of the office of the president.”

Obama’s views on meeting with potentially dangerous governments were the subject of discussion during the second presidential debate between Obama and Sen. John McCain that same year. A conservative Super PAC even made an ad targeting the “without preconditions” remark in 2008, featuring actors portraying Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Kim Jong Il (Kim Jong Un’s father) laughing about it, concluding with the words, “Barack Obama: No Match for America’s Enemies.”

But in 2018, a number of Republicans are willing to give Trump’s meeting with a dictator a chance.

“If North Korea disarms, President Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize would be well deserved”

Some conservatives are arguing that Trump’s business acumen — and even his reality show past — could be helpful in pursuing negotiations with the North Korean government and ultimately achieving disarmament.

At the conservative website the Federalist, Ed Krayewski even said that “it’s possible” for Trump’s experience in running beauty pageants and professional wrestling to play a positive role in negotiations with Pyongyang.

“It’s not so preposterous to think of diplomacy as a bit like reality television,” he wrote on Friday. “Different countries have different priorities and national security interests, but they’re operating on an international stage with an international audience, and the pressure to ‘get to yes’ that can come with that.”

On the Hill, most Republican Congress members who have issued statements upon the news of Trump’s planned meeting with North Korean officials have been pleased — Rep. Luke Messer (R-IN) even said in a statement, “If North Korea talks lead to concrete action, President Trump should be well on his way to his own Nobel Peace Prize.”

In a statement, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who had previously said that all-out war with North Korea would be “worth it in terms of long-term stability and national security,” praised President Trump’s “strong stand against North Korea” that “gives us the best hope in decades” of ending potential nuclear aggression by the North Korea government.

What will actually come of Trump’s planned meeting with Kim Jong Un remains largely a mystery. On Friday, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the meeting might not even take place: “The president will not have the meeting without seeing concrete steps and concrete actions take place by North Korea.”

And conservatives, divided now between viewing the meeting as a potential foreign policy coup or an incoming calamity, will likely remain just as in the dark as the rest of us.