Trump’s bluster brings nuclear breakthrough

Will Donald Trump be able to bring peace to the Korean peninsula? Emily Hohler reports.

Emily Hohler
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Donald Trump: a future Nobel winner?
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The "two strands of Donald Trump's nuclear diplomacy" with Iran and North Korea are set to intertwine in "ways that are hard to predict", says Julian Borger in The Guardian. Trump is threatening to pull out of the 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement with Iran (the JCPOA) by "refusing to extend sanctions waivers" when they expire on 12 May. A few weeks later he is due to hold an unprecedented summit with Kim Jong-un, at which he hopes to persuade the North Korean leader to give up his nuclear arsenal.

Trump believes that the Iran deal is flawed, and that pulling out of it would show North Korea that he is a tough negotiator who will settle for "nothing less" than permanent nuclear disarmament. But Kim may not see it this way. Scrapping the JCPOA could reinforce his belief that the Americans can't be trusted, making him cling to his nuclear arsenal all the more.

A successful deal with North Korea could, ironically, look similar to the Iran deal Trump seems "intent on scrapping", says Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post. But how likely is a deal anyway? There have been other "false dawns" and a gulf exists between the two sides' expectations for "denuclearisation". Kim has made all the right noises, but the regime has a history of "empty promises", says Eli Lake on Bloomberg. The real test is whether he will take visible steps to "dismantle his nuclear infrastructure". Kim's ability to garner "optimistic headlines" is a "testament to his connivance, not his intentions".

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Anything could happen when the two men sit down together, says Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. But for now, Trump's "peculiar form of diplomacy a combination of belligerence, bluster, name-calling and ignorance of history has somehow produced a possible breakthrough" that eluded his predecessors. If he pulls off it off, he'll deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, as South Korea's Moon Jae-in has suggested.

Emily Hohler
Emily Hohler

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.

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