U.S. President Donald Trump has held three summits with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, in the last three years and still failed to secure a denuclearization agreement. John Bolton, the former U.S. national security adviser, offers a high-level window onto these dealings in his new memoir, The Room Where It Happened. In Bolton’s telling, the U.S. president was more interested in how his peacemaking efforts would play in the media—and whether he could claim they were a “huge success”—than in actually trying to eliminate North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction. He made no effort to understand the issues or to study why U.S. approaches to North Korea had failed over three previous presidencies. Instead, he relied on his own instincts as he sought to charm Kim into a deal that was never remotely realistic.
The revelations about Trump’s failed diplomacy with Kim have attracted particular attention, but the more disturbing story Bolton tells is that of the withering of the U.S.–South Korean alliance on Trump’s watch. While in reckless pursuit of an attention-grabbing deal with the North, Trump did considerable damage to U.S. relations with Seoul. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal isn’t going anywhere—but Bolton’s book makes clear that the U.S.–South Korean alliance, long a cornerstone of U.S. defense strategy in Asia, may not survive a second Trump term.
