When unlike charges attract

When I first heard that US President Donald Trump had agreed to a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, I thought of my secondary school Physics teacher Mrs. Sally Joseph who taught that in nature, unlike charges attract while like charges repel. That Coulomb’s Law in Physics is the opposite of what obtains in […]

When I first heard that US President Donald Trump had agreed to a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, I thought of my secondary school Physics teacher Mrs. Sally Joseph who taught that in nature, unlike charges attract while like charges repel. That Coulomb’s Law in Physics is the opposite of what obtains in social and political life, where people of like minds attract while those of unlike minds repel. 

As part of his mission of turning politics, diplomacy, trade and international relations upside down however, Donald Trump transplanted Coulomb’s Law into politics, wrecked a meeting of America’s G-7’s allies in Canada, hurled insults at the Canadian Prime Minister, refused to sign the communique, left the meeting ahead of schedule and flew halfway across the world to Singapore, where he met Kim Jong-un at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa Island.

No two men on the world stage these days are more dissimilar than Trump and Kim. Even by US standards, Trump is a far-right winger with a narrow but fervent base of support. He has an even narrower economic, social and political agenda of “America First” which excludes Democrats, minorities, the poor, liberals, neighbours, the environment, Muslim countries, the Third World and almost all foreign countries including America’s once closest allies Canada, Britain, Japan, Germany and France. The fact that these countries resemble the US in most economic, social, political, cultural, strategic and military particulars has repelled instead of attracted Trump.

On the other hand Kim, who is Chairman of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, Chairman of the State Affairs Commission and Supreme Commander of the Korean Peoples Army, heads the world’s last Stalinist regime which controls its citizens more rigorously than Enver Hoxha ever did in Albania. Trump revealed a secret admiration for this system when he said after returning home from Singapore that he wished Americans will obey him as much as North Koreans obey Kim. 

Though poor and agrarian, North Korea brooks no intervention from anyone, not even from China which supplies it with most of its food, fuel, machinery, diplomatic and military protection. The border between North and South Korea, called the De-Militarised Zone [DMZ] is the most impregnable in the world. Heavy artillery, barbed wire, minefields and vigilant sentries are deployed all along it. Even reptiles may not cross it without permission. The Nigerian traveler Abdullahi No Sweat, who died recently, once said he had been to every country in the world except North Korea, which says something.

It was no small wonder that Kim agreed to meet with an American president. North Koreans are taught from childhood to hate the US with a passion. In the 1970s I read a story in Readers’ Digest which cited a question in a North Korean primary school arithmetic textbook. It said, “A Peoples Army soldier kills one US imperialist, and then kills another. How many imperialists has he killed?” 

Unlike Nigerian rulers that love to travel out frequently [Gani Fawehinmi once calculated that President Obasanjo made 102 foreign trips in his first year in office], Kim Jong-un did not step out of his country for seven years since he became its ruler in 2011. He travelled out for the first time early this year, when he went to nearby China in an armoured train. His late father and predecessor Kim Jong-Il was similarly averse to travel; he once said he was surprised people say he did not like travelling when in his lifetime he had been to the Soviet Union and China. Kim’s grandfather Kim Il-Sung, founder of the Kim dynasty, was equally averse to travel. In all the years I was growing up and was fascinated by North Korea, I never read that The Great Leader visited any country. 

It was no small leap of faith that Kim met with Trump. He did so because it spectacularly proved what he had believed all along, that the best way to earn the respect of the world’s powers is to possess nukes and threaten to use them. When leaders of countries much bigger and wealthier than DPRK have to beg the White House to come over for a short photo-op with Trump, the US President abandoned a G-7 summit of the world’s richest nations and flew across the world in order to meet with Kim, who is said to be unable to feed his people. I suspect that President Trump would meet with the Devil himself if it will create a media spectacle.

To find an equivalent spectacle, we might have to go back to January 1972, when US President Richard Nixon went to China. It is difficult to comprehend now but, in those days, the Communist Party ruled China as firmly as Kim rules North Korea today, with a highly centralized and wholly state-owned economy and brooking no dissent. The US did not even recognise China then; instead it recognized the rulers of Taiwan as the legitimate rulers of China and assisted them to occupy China’s seat at the UN, including the permanent Security Council seat. 

Richard Nixon, who by the standards of that day was a right wing American politician, went to China essentially to cash in on the Sino-Soviet split and play “the China card” against the more formidable Soviet Union. Nixon’s National Security Adviser Dr. Henry Kissinger, who made a secret trip to China to prepare for Nixon’s trip, said in his book that the trip was so secret that after he flew from Pakistan to Beijing, he found out when he arrived that he had left behind his suitcase and had to borrow a shirt from one of his aides for his meeting with Mao Zedong. Nixon famously met with Mao, who was by then very old. The Great Helmsman looked at Mrs. Nixon and told the US President, “Your wife is taller than you.”

In those days, the biggest spectacles on the world stage were meetings between US Presidents and Soviet leaders. Leonid Brezhnev met with every American President from the 1960s until his death in 1982.  The cover then was the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, SALT which later became the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, START. The talks were meant to reduce the two superpowers’ nuclear arsenals, which as at the 1980s were said to be big enough to blow the world out of its axis around the sun if they were to explode at the same time. 

The CIA is said to provide US Presidents with a “psychological profile” of any leader who is coming to visit them. Soviet leaders apparently received the same from KGB. President Nixon, who was a complicated man psychologically, hated to be touched by anyone. When Brezhnev met with him at Camp David in June 1973 he kept reaching out and playfully grabbing Nixon’s knee. The cameras caught Nixon cringing with every touch. 

In sheer drama, probably no meeting in the last 40 years neared Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s 1977 visit to Jerusalem, where he met Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and addressed the Knesset. Egypt and Israel were technically at war when Sadat visited Jerusalem. At least Trump and Kim are not neighbours and Trump does not occupy a slice of North Korea. Sadat’s trip led to the 1978 Camp David Accords with Israel. Egypt paid dearly for it because its Arab brothers ostracized it and removed the Arab League headquarters from Cairo. Sadat also paid the supreme price when a band of rebel soldiers shot him at a parade in October 1981.

Six years ago, the world watched in amazement as US President Obama shook hands with Cuban President Raul Castro at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. For a time I was afraid that the Trump-Kim meeting might go the way of a 1934 meeting in Nicaragua. The ruler of Nicaragua then, General Somoza Garcia, promised safe passage to guerrilla leader General Augusto Sandino to come to Managua for peace talks. As soon as they sat down to talk, Somoza’s aides shot Sandino.