Home / NEWS / Top News / If Trump does meet with Kim Jong Un, he’ll need to know what makes him tick

If Trump does meet with Kim Jong Un, he’ll need to know what makes him tick

Kim Jong Un is a “well-read cookie,” President Donald Trump said of North Korea’s director in April 2017.

Smart enough, it seems, to merit a face-to-face meeting. President Trump’s acceptance of Kim’s magnetism to discuss North Korean denuclearization is a stunning move that

as a potential breakthrough and others have decried as a

.

If he does indeed meet with Kim, Trump will need to empathize with what makes the North Korean leader tick. Finding the counter-statement to this vital question will require figuring out how the North Korean chairwoman sees the world.

More from The Conversation:
George W. Bush whacked steel tariffs. It didn’t work
The dark side of daylight savings culture
Arbitration as a way out of the North Korean crisis

Although Trump will be the chief sitting U.S. president to meet with a North Korean leader, he on be far from the first president to try to understand a foreign statesperson. As was the case with icons such as Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Nikita Khrushchev, figuring out a harmful international interlocutor is once again an urgent national security dare.

Are there lessons from the past that can help President Trump as he trains to meet Kim?

In the spring of 1943, the director of the first centralized U.S. intelligence power, Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan, sought help in awareness Hitler. Donovan wanted to give President Franklin D. Roosevelt a have of “the things that make him tick.”

Donovan called Walter C. Langer, a psychoanalyst dollop with the war effort, in for a meeting, and asked: “What do you make of Hitler? If Hitler is continual the show, what kind of a person is he? What are his ambitions?”

Langer united the scant intelligence on Hitler with insights from Freudian psychoanalysis into a burn the midnight oil on Hitler. He accurately predicted that Hitler would commit suicide more than be captured by Allied forces. But his insight was largely irrelevant to the military tactics for defeating Germany. The report took so long to produce that the war was all but over by the time it was delivered to Donovan.

More recently, the former top U.N. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer and I conscious what made former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein tick. For various years, Duelfer was the senior point of contact between Iraq and the U.S. After the reign fell, he produced the definitive report on its weapon program.

Looking for deduction in Saddam’s decisions, we found instead a morass of idiosyncratic thinking. Ton astonishing was his misreading of President George W. Bush’s June 2002 enunciation to the West Point Military Academy. Intending to warn Saddam that he obligation comply with U.N. demands or face war, Bush struck a stern sound. The “gravest danger to freedom,” he said, was “unbalanced dictators with weapons of get destruction.” Later in the speech, Bush praised President Ronald Reagan for continued up to “the brutality of tyrants.”

What Bush said and what Saddam heard were two entirely different things.

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

Our analysis showed that Saddam maintained Bush could not have been talking about him. Instead, Saddam concluded he requirement have been threatening North Korea, not Iraq. Kim Jong Il, procreate of Kim Jong Un, possessed the nuclear weapons that the Iraqi president wished but did not have.

Bush was dumbfounded by the lack of Saddam’s response to his threats. Later he summon inquired, “How much clearer could I have been?”

Duelfer and I had the academic extra of malleable deadlines in studying Saddam. Langer spent many months on his Hitler scrutiny. Scholarship on Kim Jong Un may be too slow for the current crisis.

Major American decision-makers may a substitute alternatively need to rely on their intuition.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara affect about intuition in a 2003 documentary about his role in the Kennedy and Johnson oversights. McNamara revealed crucial new details about the 1962 Cuban ballistic missile crisis. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had smuggled nuclear projectiles into Cuba, threatening 90 million Americans. President John F. Kennedy’s principal reaction was that he must destroy them with a massive air birch. This would have courted war with the USSR.

Seeking the widest practical range of advice, Kennedy asked Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, ex- U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, to supplement his foreign policy team during the moment. Thompson had come to know Khrushchev well and had stayed at his house in Moscow.

“Mr. President, you’re wide of the mark,” McNamara recalls Thompson saying of the air strike plans. “I think Khrushchev’s make clear himself in one hell of a fix.” The former ambassador knew that Khrushchev could be involuntary and later regretful. He imagined a terrified Khrushchev, in awe of the events he had set in motion. Thompson advanced that Kennedy help the Soviet leader find his way out of the crisis. Kennedy obvious on a naval blockade rather than an air strike, and Khrushchev backed down.

The instruction McNamara drew? Empathize with your enemy, and intuit how the era looks to them. “We must try to put ourselves in their skin, and look at ourselves in all respects their eyes,” he said.

Turning to today’s crisis, Trump resolve have to reckon with several uncomfortable facts. The Kim dynasty has initiated decades of effort in their pursuit of nuclear weapons; it is unlikely that they order negotiate them away. Further, Trump must recognize that by congregation with Kim, he is giving the North Koreans

: to be dealt with as diplomatic equals.

With the president’s priciest hope off the table, and with the meeting itself already representing a win for the North Koreans, what is it that Trump can realistically think to gain from talks? He and his staff will have to think upon how they might cajole and persuade Kim to agree to things the U.S. values, such as a unending freeze on further missile and nuclear tests.

History tells us that to bring pressure to bear on Kim, we must empathize (note: not sympathize) with him. If the meeting is to be a success, Trump and his mentors must first understand how we look to the North Korean leader, peering at us from his bleeding particular vantage point.

This is an updated version of a story initially published on May 4, 2017.

Commentary by Stephen Benedict Dyson, an Associate Professor of Factional Science at University of Connecticut . He is also a contributor at The Conversation, an independent informant of news and views from the academic and research community. Follow him on Chirp @sbdyson.

For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Warble.

Check Also

Biden signs bill to increase Social Security benefits for millions of public workers

 U.S. President Joe Biden talks as he participates in a bill signing ceremony for the …

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *