Is Trump Going To The Singapore Summit Unprepared? Is He Winging It?
Trump and Bolton spurn top-level North Korea planning
After two months on the job, Trump’s new national security adviser has not called a single Cabinet-level National Security Council meeting on North Korea.
Extract: National security adviser John Bolton has yet to convene a Cabinet-level meeting to discuss President Donald Trump’s upcoming summit with North Korea next week, a striking break from past practice that suggests the Trump White House is largely improvising its approach to the unprecedented nuclear talks.
For decades, top presidential advisers have used a methodical process to hash out national security issues before offering the president a menu of options for key decisions. On an issue like North Korea, that would mean White House Situation Room gatherings of the secretaries of state and defense along with top intelligence officials, the United Nations ambassador, and even the Treasury secretary, who oversees economic sanctions.
Trump himself has driven the preparation almost exclusively on his own, consulting little with his national security team beyond Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has made two visits to Pyongyang to meet with Kim personally. Trump has also not presided personally over a meeting of those senior NSC officials, as a president typically does when making the most important decisions.
Senior officials from both the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations called the absence of a formal interagency process before such a consequential meeting troubling.
Officials say the policymaking process across the White House, never a tightly organized affair, has recently grown less disciplined. They point to John Kelly’s loosening grip on the West Wing, at which Trump has always chafed, and with it, the dissolution of many of the processes he tried to institute when he arrived a year ago.
Without that coordinated process, the president “cannot understand the equities that different elements of the government have in this,” said a former senior Bush administration official who served both in the White House and at the State Department.
Part of the problem is Trump’s on-and-off chemistry with Bolton. The president fumed after Bolton spoke of a hard-line “Libya model” for North Korean denuclearization. Trump blamed Bolton for derailing the summit.
Nevertheless, Bolton will travel to Singapore, as will Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Chief of Staff Kelly.
Many Asia experts worry that Trump is, as one former Bush official who worked on Asia policy recently put it to POLITICO, “going to wing this summit.” The concern is shared by Japanese government officials who consider North Korea a threat to their security and worry Trump might cut a superficial deal that does too little to disarm Kim.
Senior Presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway on Wednesday insisted that Trump is hard at work in preparation for the summit, scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday. But when pressed, she declined to elaborate on any specifics. For more, please see the hyperlink below:
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/07/trump-bolton-north-korea-630362
Foreign Policy & Domestic Politics 