Editorial: Big summit, little gains

THE ISSUE:

President Donald Trump and North Korea's leader sign a statement long on hopes and short on specifics.

THE STAKES:

Will America get anything in exchange for what it gave?

Give President Donald Trump his due on his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un: It is better to have a dialogue — however scripted and devoid of substance — with the murderous dictator of a nuclear-armed nation than to engage in the kind of provocative war of Twitter insults that preceded this meeting.

Mr. Trump seems to have defused, at least for now, a crisis that for months he had helped escalate. But to suggest he achieved a foreign policy coup would be naive, and possible only by ignoring some troubling realities.

Chief among them is that Mr. Kim gave up nothing in the meeting, while Mr. Trump made a significant concession: to end joint military exercises with South Korea. Mr. Trump seems to have made that decision in a virtual vacuum, surprising the Pentagon, his State Department, and our longtime allies in South Korea.

In return, Mr. Trump got little more than an nonspecific agreement from a nation that has a history of breaking agreements: that North Korea will work on denuclearizing the Korean peninsula and on improving relations.

The warm meeting stood in sharp contrast to the extraordinarily bitter terms on which Mr. Trump had just left the G-7 summit with America's allies, particularly his insults of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Our adversaries around the globe must be thrilled at how Mr. Trump is weakening the western alliance even as he bolsters a regime with among the world's worst human rights records.

Mr. Trump's behavior continues a pattern of expressing hostility toward America's best friends and the nation's strategic alliances while embracing some of the world's worst players, like Russia's Vladimir Putin, the Philippines' Rodrigo Duterte, and now Mr. Kim. "Talented," Mr. Trump calls the brutal North Korean despot, whose family has ruled the insular nation for 70 years. He "loves his people," perhaps except for the hundreds of thousands who have died in his death camps.

Mr. Trump's feat, a vague plan to denuclearize the region, also stands in contrast to his decision to tear up the far more concrete deal worked out with Iran by the U.S. under President Barack Obama, the other permanent members of the UN Security Council, and the European Union. That agreement, flawed as it may have been, actually halted Iran's nuclear weapons development and set up an inspection program. The hazy North Korean plan envisions Mr. Kim someday surrendering the very nuclear weapons and long-range missiles that got Mr. Trump's attention in the first place. There is no plan for verification, no reason beyond "great chemistry" Mr. Trump says he had with Mr. Kim to believe that this North Korean promise, which we've heard before, is real.

The future Mr. Trump has shaped seems to be about as clear as his trademark reality show-style cliffhanger line, "We'll see what happens." But at least he and Mr. Kim have eased up on the insults and backed away from the red buttons. That, in the Trump era, is what passes for stability.