John Roughan: Trump might be the dealer to end the Korean farce

A woman walks by a huge screen showing U.S. President Donald Trump, left, and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un, in Tokyo. Photo / AP

There were moments in the early stages of the last American presidential election when I found Donald Trump a breath of fresh air. The moments were when he was on stage with about 20 other Republicans seeking the party's nomination and Trump would challenge long-standing American foreign policy on the Gulf War, Syria, even Israel briefly.

He challenged foreign policy on many other fronts that alarmed me — Nato, trade deals, China, Russia — and his wish to disengage America from global leadership in general was senseless. But in a few places military disengagement might be no bad thing. Such as the Korean peninsula.

Trump's acceptance of a face-to-face meeting with his North Korean counterpart is nothing short of exciting. It is being compared to Ronald Reagan's meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986. Those two leaders got along so well that, to the consternation of officials, their discussion turned to serious consideration of mutual nuclear disarmament.

It was only Reagan's refusal to give up his hopes of a "Star Wars" nuclear shield that stood in the way of an agreement but Reykjavik led directly to arms limitation and reduction agreements in the years ahead.

Kim Jong-un, as far as we know, is no Gorbachev. There is no sign of a North Korean perestroika. But then Trump is no Reagan, Trump is much more of a loose cannon. Reagan was guided by his officials in the lead-up to Reykjavik, Trump seems to have accepted the North Korean invitation completely on his own impulse.

He sacked his Secretary of State this week. Rex Tillerson has been labouring in conventional diplomatic backchannels to North Korea for the past year while Trump tweeted his fire and fury to "Little Rocket Man". It is amazing Tillerson stayed after the tweet last year telling the world (and North Korea) the Secretary of State was wasting his time.

Not only is Trump not listening to officials, the State Department is said be seriously lacking expertise on Asia and the Pacific these days. Those are not desks this White House has bothered to fill.

So if Trump really goes face-to-face with Kim anything could happen. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility Trump could agree to a complete withdrawal of US forces from South Korea. It would accord with his doctrine of America First.

Nothing could be better, I believe, for peace in Northeast Asia.

Like many journalists around the Pacific, I have been treated to a State Department travelling seminar on the hemisphere's security. The climax of the tour is invariably a trip into the "demilitarised" zone dividing the Koreas. You board a US Army bus and set off expecting lots of fortifications and high tension. What you see is lots of fortifications and high farce, though you are not allowed to laugh.

As a visitor you are advised not to look at the North Koreans, so you gaze at empty land on their side, and a pretty little toytown village where nobody lives. At some point you are escorted into a room that straddles the border where the two sides sometimes talk, usually after a firefight, we were told, though it was hard to imagine one in a place that felt more like a museum tableau frozen in 1950 than a zone of potential conflict today.

In Seoul you are constantly reminded you are in range of North Korean artillery but only by Americans. The South Koreans we met were more concerned the North Korean regime would collapse under the poverty their population was thought to be suffering at that time. The South was worried about an invasion by starving relatives, not conquering troops.

Every time the North carries out a missile test, the South is reported to be far more relaxed than the US. Koreans speak the same language and those in the South understand the rhetoric from the North better than anybody else. They seem to treat it with contempt not fear.

The South makes endless attempts to mollify the regime across the border, most recently with the Winter Olympics. When the South brought Kim's invitation to Trump, the State Department and the Pentagon would have been as stoney faced as Vice-President Mike Pence when Kim's sister sat behind him at the Olympics. But Trump is different.

He operates on personal chemistry. He is visibly awkward in the company of professional democratic leaders but he finds a rapport with domineering autocrats. His attitude to China changed completely after meeting President (for life now) Xi.

If the world's two worst haircuts sit down together and Kim offers verifiable nuclear disarmament on condition the US withdraws its forces from the peninsula over the same period, Trump might well do the deal. It could be the best thing he ever does.