Editorial | Collapse of Korea summit unsurprising

People who appreciate the complexities of international negotiations will hardly be surprised at the collapse of the planned summit between America's Donald Trump and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un.

They had intended to talk about the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. But the art of such deals is set in neither wishful thinking nor bluster, but painstakingly hard work and preparation. Which didn't happen.

Put differently, this episode again highlights Mr Trump's ignorance of the working of global relations and of governance and government. And he appears not to have had the administrative machinery to help navigate the process, or was not prepared to listen.

The United States and, indeed, the world have long been concerned about North Korea's nuclear ambitions, which accelerated with Mr Trump's incumbency in the White House, despite the bellicosity of the president's warnings to Pyongyang. Mr Kim snubbed his nose, traded insults with Mr Trump, and went ahead developing his bomb and testing long-range rockets.

Now, North Korea is not only said to possess the bomb, but systems to deliver it over vast distances. He can hit cities in the United States and certainly countries in Asia. It was surprising, in the circumstance, when, in the aftermath of a meeting with Mr Trump, South Korean officials announced that the US president would be willing to meet with Mr Kim, followed by the disclosure that a summit was planned for next month in Singapore.

Mr Kim had declared himself ready for the total denuclearisation of the peninsula his country shares with South Korea, and with which North Korea, after more than 60 years, is still technically at war. What no one bothered to work out before Mr Trump agreed to a summit is what the North Koreans meant by denuclearisation. Mr Trump apparently salivated at the prospect of returning from Singapore with Kim Jong-un's capitulation, having surrendered his nuclear weapons and all possibility of developing new ones. Like Barack Obama, Mr Trump would probably win the Nobel Prize for peace, the prospect of which was floated by the South Korean leader, Moon Jae-in.

Negotiating as equals

The North Koreans, clearly, had a broader interpretation of denuclearisation, including negotiating as equals with the United States. That would perhaps mean phased reductions/elimination of its nuclear capability, with each step rewarded by the removal of sanctions and provision of economic support. These would be underpinned by a security guarantee involving, among other things, America's reduction of its military capacity in South Korea and from the surrounding seas. This kind of clarity is normally arrived at by painstaking preparatory work, rather than the shotgun meetings that Mr Trump's new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, appeared to have engaged during secret sessions in Pyongyang.

Usually, when leaders meet, it is to affix the final flourishes to agreements previously worked out by their officials. Having failed to do this background work, and faced with the differing interpretations of the context of the summit, Mr Trump's hawkish national security adviser John Bolton talked of the "Libya model" of non-proliferation - perhaps referring to Muammar Gaddafi's 2003 renunciation of his nuclear efforts - but was conflated by Mr Trump and Vice-president Mike Pence with Gaddafi's murder by rebels during the Arab Spring after his regime was toppled with the help of Western bombers.

The image of the defiling of Gaddafi's body having been evoked, Mr Kim was understandably skittish, igniting angry responses from Pyongyang, providing the basis for Mr Trump to cancel the summit, but holding out the possibility for a meeting some time in the future. We, though, wouldn't be taken aback if the Gaddafi narrative, starting with Mr Bolton, was orchestrated towards this end.

Sadly, this is merely another episode in Mr Trump's miserable presidency.