‘Sometimes You Have To Walk’

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The New York Sun

The collapse of President Trump’s summit with the North Korean party boss, Kim Jong Un, certainly takes us back — to October 12, 1986. That’s when President Reagan stood up and walked out of the Reykjavik summit with another party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, of the Soviet Union. We can remember it like it was yesterday. The long faces, the dire predictions, the Left’s instinct to blame the Americans.

“What appears to have happened in Iceland is this,” the New York Times editorialized. “Mr. Reagan had the chance to eliminate Soviet and U.S. medium-range nuclear weapons in Europe, to work toward a test ban on his terms, to halve nuclear arsenals in five years and to agree on huge reductions later. He said no.” The Times just didn’t see that the Hollywood actor turned president had just won the Cold War.

It’s too early in the morning — this editorial is being written at 3 a.m. at New York — to know whether that’s the kind of thing that just happened at Hanoi, whence news reports are just coming in. Messrs. Trump and Kim were supposed to have a working lunch, to be followed by the signing of some sort of agreement. The next thing you know, Mr. Trump is heading home.

It’s not too early, though, to caution against over-reacting to this development. What appears to have happened is that the Korean Reds wouldn’t agree to the complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization that we seek. Our side wouldn’t agree to the dismantling of all the sanctions the North Koreans seek to have dismantled. “Sometimes you have to walk,” Mr. Trump told the press.

Good for him, we say. It would be a fitting epitaph for any statesman. Particularly because it was hard to try, even for the optimists, to noodle what success at this summit might look like. A partial pullback from the Demilitarized Zone, say, or a pact against, at least, proliferation? Could those be interim steps in the face of failure to ink a more strategic, permanent pact?

No doubt the temptation for Mr. Trump to reach at least some deal was enormous. It would have been nice, optically, to return from Hanoi with something to eclipse the House of Representatives’ “ratfest,” as the Drudge Report headlined the hearings for Michael Cohen. Far better, in our view, for Mr. Trump to do what he did — and to remember Reagan, who taught that walking out can be the part of realism.


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