Why Trump bombed in Hanoi

WHEN GLOBAL summit meetings end as fast as the one just wrapped in Hanoi, it’s for one of two reasons: Either the summiteers realized they had no differences of opinion to slow things down, or they found out early that their differences of opinion would short-circuit anything else from happening.

We might have guessed that the second Donald Trump summit with Kim Jong Un of North Korea, just ended in Hanoi, would have the same kind of unsatisfying stalemate as happened last June in Singapore. We could tell that the first day, when it was announced that North Korea and the United States had already failed to reach agreement on the crippling sanctions imposed on North Korea.

What followed that first news were claims and counterclaims, concessions asked for and concessions purportedly ignored, each country offering an explanation as to why things went south so fast.

From the North Korean perspective, it may have come down to intransigence, an unwillingness to budge. But for the United States, the failed talks in Hanoi point to a growing institutionalization of American failure on the world stage, an inability to successfully advance American values and interests in a vital region of a shrinking, combustible world. ...

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