New York Times Believes the Trump-Kim II Summit was a Failure, But Was It?

This time the New York Times is piling on President Trump for not reaching a deal with Kim Jong-un during the Vietnam summit:

As President Trump settled into the dining room of a French-colonial hotel in Hanoi on Thursday morning, the conversation with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader with whom he had struck up the oddest of friendships, was already turning tense.
In a dinner at the Metropole Hotel the evening before, mere feet from the bomb shelter where guests took cover during the Vietnam War, Mr. Kim had resisted what Mr. Trump presented as a grand bargain: North Korea would trade all its nuclear weapons, material and facilities for an end to the American-led sanctions squeezing its economy.
An American official later described this as “a proposal to go big,” a bet by Mr. Trump that his force of personality, and view of himself as a consummate dealmaker, would succeed where three previous presidents had failed.
But Mr. Trump’s offer was essentially the same deal that the United States has pushed — and the North has rejected — for a quarter century. Intelligence agencies had warned him, publicly, Mr. Kim would not be willing to give up the arsenal completely. North Korea itself had said repeatedly that it would only move gradually.

Several of Mr. Trump’s own aides, led by national security adviser John R. Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, thought the chances of a grand bargain for total nuclear disarmament were virtually zero. Some questioned whether the summit meeting should go forward.

New York Times

You can read more at the link, but if President Trump had struck a deal to drop sanctions in return for dismantling Yongbyon these same critics would be saying it was a bad deal for the reasons listed in this article, which it would be. That is why the only option was to get them to agree to give up all their nuclear capabilities in return for dropping sanctions even if as Mr. Bolton believed the odds were close to zero of it happening.

I have not seen anyone in the media yet discuss how President Trump is setting up Kim Jong-un for stronger actions in the future if he restarts a provocation cycle strategy. If the US has a strong reaction to a North Korean provocation, the Trump administration would have a strong case that they have tried all diplomatic measures to include canceling military exercises, not putting out provocative statements, treating Kim Jong-un with respect, and even meeting with him, not once, but twice to hash out a deal. That is why I think the Vietnam summit went forward more than hoping an almost 0% chance of a deal would be struck.

The fact that President Trump kept expectations low before the summit, so readily offered up the grand bargain, and then left quickly afterwards shows this was the strategy going in to the summit. It has now been made very clear to Kim Jong-un what the price for dropping sanctions will be and now the ball is in his court on how he wants to respond.