A meeting between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump is possible – and could be surprisingly fruitful

Ever since he came to power, after the unexpected death of his father, Kim and his country have been isolated. It is doubtful that he played the nuclear card to wage war, more to demonstrate power. With no peace treaty with the South and distinctly patchy diplomatic connections, you can understand why his aims are security and recognition

The North Korean leader has cut an isolated figure since taking over from his father in 2012 (Reuters)

There are times in diplomacy when a proposal is made that seems so implausible, so absurd, that it is dismissed as, at best, extreme kite-flying, at worst a mistake. It may excite a brief flurry of interest, but its fate is generally to be laughed off before being allowed to flicker and die.

That is more or less what happened this week when Donald Trump suggested that he might contemplate a meeting with none other than the West’s current Enemy Number One, the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un. In an interview with Bloomberg News, the US President actually went a bit further, saying: “If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely; I would be honoured to do it.” In a separate interview, he described the man almost universally vilified for threatening nuclear war as a “smart cookie”, essentially for managing to stay in power.

Ridicule and condemnation duly followed. The New York Times reported that Trump was continuing his “outreach to rogue leaders”. The former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, took particular issue with the word “honoured”, describing it as “the wrong way to discuss somebody who is keeping his people in poverty and starving and control”.

And that was pretty much that. If there was any kite-flying – and it can be hard to tell with this President: did he accept that early phone call from Taiwan in order to send a signal or simply because he was unaware of the implications? The suggestion of a summit between Trump and Kim was swiftly slapped down by the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, who put such a meeting very far in the conditional, saying it would depend on North Korea becoming “serious about completely dismantling its nuclear capacity”.

So that all sounds like a no. No meeting, not now, and not in the foreseeable future. But I wonder, is a Trump-Kim meeting quite as implausible as Spicer’s comments made it appear – and, even if it is, should it be?

In his first four months, Donald Trump has already set something of a pattern of personal diplomacy. His approach seems to be: let them come; we’ll take a look at each other and see whether we might be able to get along. There was something of that in what he said during the transition about his hopes for a better relationship with Vladimir Putin and Russia, but that meeting is on hold, waiting for the anti-Russia frenzy in Washington to die down.

Consider the steady stream of visitors to Washington and the “winter White House” in Florida, however, and Trump seems to have established a personal rapport with most of those he has met. They include Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, and China’s President, Xi Jinping, who appeared to leave Trump favourably impressed. How far Trump’s personal glad-handing will augment, or supplant, more traditional diplomacy, remains to be seen. There is certainly wariness, not to say outright disapproval, in some quarters.

What it does suggest, though, is that Trump is open to meeting almost anyone who is prepared to meet him – on the grounds, perhaps, that this is how he approached his business relationships. You start by taking the measure of the person, factoring in what others say, but trusting your own judgement as to whether a deal can be done. And any deal has to suit both sides, or it will not stick.

If this is the pattern, then an eventual meeting with Kim Jong-un cannot be ruled out. The young North Korean leader’s record suggests a ruthless side – “smart cookie” might be one, exceptionally mild, way of putting it – but if Trump judges that meeting Kim could have a positive outcome, in perhaps making that part of the world safer, then he might be the person to give it a go.

It would be a gamble, even reckless. But Trump seems refreshingly open to the risk of a failed meeting, and why not? As he said when he broached a meeting with Putin, “It would be a fantastic thing if we got along with Putin and if we got along with Russia – and that could happen, and it may not happen.” But the dignity of the office and the superiority of American power are such that a US President actually has very little to lose from a meeting that proves fruitless. The loss is almost entirely on the other side.

And a meeting with Kim Jong-un, or rather the prospect of a meeting, might exert just the sort of leverage to temper the North Korean leader’s rashness. Ever since he came to power, after the unexpected death of his father, Kim and his country have been isolated. It is doubtful that he played the nuclear card to wage war, more to demonstrate power – his own and that of his weakling country. The result, though, was only to reinforce North Korea’s status as a pariah.

The six-party nuclear talks were called off, and the 1990s “sunshine” diplomacy with South Korea seemed consigned to another age. Aside from an ever more cautious China, North Korea had no one to talk to. And rather than pressuring the North to change, South Korea’s periodic military exercises with the US fostered fear, and a real risk that the young and unpractised Kim might lash out.

Barack Obama went some way towards recognising that risk. When Kim responded to a spate of US stealth flights close to North Korean air space with a nuclear test, Obama called off the stealth flights. Kim himself has also, on occasion, hinted at what he is aiming for, which boils down to security and recognition. With no peace treaty with the South and distinctly patchy diplomatic recognition, you can understand why these might be his objectives. He just seems at a loss to know how to go about attaining them – which is understandable, given his country’s long isolation.

A tragicomic episode in 2013 serves to highlight the difficulty. An ardent basketball fan, Kim Jong-un invited Michael Jordan to visit North Korea, with a team. Jordan declined. Dennis Rodman went instead, and was treated to a bizarre one-on-one meeting with Kim. He returned, suggesting to then President Obama that Kim would appreciate a call. It is not recorded whether that call was ever made, but, assuming it wasn’t, this was a missed opportunity to test what might have been an overture from the so-called hermit state.

Four years later, a new President of a very different stamp has suggested – by accident or design – that he might be prepared, nay “honoured”, to meet Kim Jong-un. Such a meeting would have to be well prepared; there would be concerns to be allayed in South Korea, in Japan, and perhaps in China, too. But if an encounter could be engineered, perhaps in a third country or on the margins of an international gathering, and if it produced even the most fleeting footage of a Donald-Kim handshake – that infamous Trump handshake – Kim Jong-un just might start to believe that talking was a more effective way of being listened to than planning his next nuclear test or misfiring missiles into someone else’s sea.