The verdict is in on Trump’s refusal to strike a deal with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un at their summit in Hanoi last week — or more precisely two verdicts are in. The media and the usual Trump critics have pronounced the summit a disaster: “How the Trump-Kim Summit Failed: Big Threats, Big Egos, Bad Bets,” is how the New York Times portrayed it. The other verdict comes from Trump admirers who have compared Trump’s performance with Ronald Reagan’s at Reykjavík in 1986, when Reagan walked away from a deal with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev regarding nuclear weapons — a walkout that most historians now concede represented a watershed in U.S.–Soviet relations and led ultimately to the end of the Cold War.
As it happens, the admirers are more correct than the critics. But it’s important to understand why the comparison with Reagan is not farfetched — and why in this case President Trump has a much stronger hand to play with the North Koreans than Reagan had with Gorbachev.
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