Fox News host Sean Hannity sat down with President Donald Trump in Hanoi, the capital of communist Vietnam, to discuss why he walked away from a denuclearization deal with North Korea.
“You have to be prepared to walk,” Trump said, “and this just wouldn’t have been good for our country.”
Walking away
Hannity explained the stakes of the negotiations during a Wednesday evening segment of his show. “When you’re talking about hitting the continental United States, Boston, New York, with a nuclear weapon and what we were hearing before the first summit, this would be — if we can get this thing accomplished, this would be major history.”
When it comes to nuclear arms control, the most prudent course of action for world leaders is often to play the long game. While some people would praise the president for making any deal at all, Trump reflected, he wasn’t willing to sacrifice U.S. national security for a temporary diplomatic victory.
“But I wanted them to denuke, and they wouldn’t do the full [denuclearization]. They wanted to [do] just some, and I guess a lot of people would have said, that’s a great start,” Trump predicted. “But I just didn’t feel it was right.”
President Trump has been an enduring critic of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — or the nuclear deal with Iran — because then-President Barack Obama was obsessed with signing a legacy agreement with Iran which he could then point to as a foreign policy achievement. Fortunately, his successor doesn’t appear to be concerned by his presidential legacy and is willing to walk away from a bad deal.
The Reagan connection
Hannity compared Trump’s actions in Hanoi with those of former President Ronald Reagan, who scrapped a deal with the Soviet Union in ReykjavÃk, Iceland in 1986. Reagan was unwilling to forfeit his Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile defense shield that Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev found intolerable, forcing both leaders to walk away from the summit without establishing peace.
“Well, whether it’s Reagan, whether it’s anybody, I mean, you have to be prepared to walk, and this just wouldn’t have been good for our country,” Trump said. “And, frankly, [Korean dictator Kim Jong Un] could look at it the same way.
“But we get along really well,” Trump said of his relationship with Kim. “He’s a different kind of a guy, and I just said, look, this isn’t going to be working.”
The bottom line
Pressed for details on where the negotiations may have stalled, Trump explained how Kim was only willing to shut down one nuclear facility in exchange for a complete end to U.S. sanctions.
“Well, they wanted to denuke certain areas and I wanted everything. And the sanctions are there and I didn’t want to give up the sanctions unless we had a real program,” the president recalled. “And they’re not ready for that and I understand that fully, I really do. I mean, they spent a lot of time building it and that doesn’t mean the world has to be happy.”
The “bottom line,” Trump said, was that both leaders wanted to make a deal, but now wasn’t the “right time.”
While Democrats view the Hanoi summit as a failure on the part of a Republican president to leave Vietnam with any deal, Trump demonstrated strength and resolve by walking away when an agreement that served U.S. interests became unachievable. For that, he deserves his nation’s appreciation.
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