President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are to meet in Vietnam on Wednesday and Thursday. The two met last year in Singapore. Duke University foreign policy expert Bruce Jentleson, a former U.S. State Department senior adviser, is available to comment on this week’s summit.
- Quotes:
"At Singapore, given how volatile the situation had become, avoiding breakdown may have been enough. This time, it may not be,” Bruce Jentleson, a professor of public policy and political science at Duke University, wrote in a Feb. 7 commentary for War on the Rocks.“Expectations have been reset. Diplomatic maneuverings have changed the baseline. The nuclear threat persists. ‘I came, we met, it was incredible, better than anyone ever before’ – the standard Trump tropes – won’t be sufficient. And if this summit doesn’t go well, given Trump’s proclivity to revert to attack mode, ‘little rocket man’ insults and ‘fire and fury’ threats may not be far behind,” wrote Jentleson, a former senior adviser to the U.S. State Department policy planning director.
“While full rapprochement is unrealistic, breakthrough is needed. Getting the policy right, the personal to click, and the politics manageable is a tall order. It was for Kissinger and Zhou, Nixon and Mao, and Reagan and Gorbachev, yet they achieved breakthroughs on issues no less (arguably even more) difficult. Comparable statesmanship needs to be exercised again if crucial progress is to be made – and renewed risk of war averted.”
- Bio:
Bruce Jentleson is a professor of public policy and political science at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy and author of the book, “The Peacemakers: Leadership Lessons From Twentieth-Century Statesmanship” (2018). In 2009-11 he was a senior adviser at the State Department, working on the Middle East and other issues.Jentleson was the 2015-16 Henry Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress, and a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
http://sanford.duke.edu/people/faculty/jentleson-bruce-w
- For additional comment, contact Bruce Jentleson at:
bwj7@duke.edu
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