President Trump aborted the summit scheduled on June 12 in Singapore with Kim Jong-un after North Korea used bad word to call Vice President Mike Pence as "political dummy"

VietPress USA (May 24, 2018): Today on Thursday, May 24, 2018, President Trump officially canceled the U.S.-North Korea summit scheduled to take place on next June 12 as scheduled in Singapore.

Last week, North Korea pulled out of a planned peace talks with South Korea as objecting to long-scheduled joint military exercises between U.S. and Republic of Korea forces. North Korea threatened to abandon the planned Trump-Kim meeting over U.S. insistence on denuclearizing the peninsula, issuing a harshly worded missive that the White House dismissed as a negotiating ploy.

Trump replied to North Korea’s threat with one of his own, saying, “You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.”

Trump noted that he still hopes to meet Kim Jong Un at some point if their regime agrees to the terms set out by the U.S. and said if he changes his mind that they should not hesitate to reach out. The president thanked the North Koreans for releasing three U.S. hostages detained by the regime under false pretenses.

Please read the full details of the news from the Washington Post at this Link:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/05/24/trump-canceled-the-summit-with-north-korea-heres-why-its-a-missed-opportunity/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a1ff5bc3f067

By Marcus Holmes and Keren Yarhi-MiloMay 24 at 11:00 AM

President Trump announced Thursday that the planned June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is canceled. What does the cancellation mean? Does face-to-face diplomacy really matter?

The summit would have been a historic first between a sitting U.S. president and the leader of North Korea.

Analysts disagreed sharply in their assessments of what the meeting might have accomplished and even on whether engaging face-to-face was wise. Here’s what we know about the effectiveness of face-to-face diplomacy, based on recent research in this field.

1) Trump and Kim might have learned from what they said — but also what they saw face-to-face 

Fear and mistrust can lead to otherwise avoidable conflict. Determining the intentions of allies and adversaries is one of the biggest challenges in foreign policy. Successful bargaining often requires one side to accurately understand the other’s intentions. Leaders and diplomats have long argued that sitting down face-to-face is the best way to gain this understanding.

Here’s why: Decades of research in sociology, psychology and neuroscience explain how we make inferences about people’s intentions not just from what they say but also from how they act. Facial expressions, microexpressions, emotions, tone of voice, body posture, movements, winks and twitches all give clues about a person’s mental state. And policymakers take this evidence seriously.

Keren Yarhi-Milo, one of the authors of this article, argues that leaders use face-to-face interactions to gain information and impressions about the intentions of their counterparts because such encounters are vivid. Literature in social psychology has long shown that information that is vivid, personalized and emotionally engaging will play a larger role in the decision-making process than information that is more informative but less vivid to the decision-maker.

There may be good reason for this. Because many expressive behaviors are involuntary, or difficult to control, they may serve as examples of what Robert Jervis has called ‘indices’ of intentions — the signals of intent that are more believable because they are harder to fake.

Neuroscience provides insights into many of these findings. Drawing on research on the philosophy of mind and social neuroscience, Marcus Holmes, who also co-wrote this article, argues that we put ourselves in the position of others in face-to-face interactions, simulating in our own minds our counterparts’ sincere, specific intentions.

A news broadcast featuring President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un airs at a railway station in Seoul on May 23. (Lee Jin-man/AP)

2) Successful summits take empathy

Summits are more likely to produce positive outcomes when leaders are able to subjectively feel where the other is coming from in terms of positions and interests. This process of empathizing with the other — not necessarily sympathizing — is crucial to overcoming what Ole Holsti has called the “inherent bad faith model.”Leaders have to believe that the other side is willing to negotiate in good faith, or they will discount any concessions as meaningless.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton learned the importance of empathy when the highly anticipated Camp David summit between Israeli leader Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat ended in disappointment. “As usual,” Clinton recounted, “each leader saw his own position more clearly than he saw the other side.”

In our research, we found that the inability or unwillingness of the leaders to understand their counterparts doomed the summit from the start. Although the 1978 Camp David talks featured two leaders — Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin — with similar antipathy, the big difference was an empathetic mediator, Jimmy Carter.

We found that Carter was able to work individually with Sadat and Begin in face-to-face meetings, gradually building empathy and communication between the two. Even if the adversaries at a summit are not empathetic, an empathic mediator can make the crucial difference in bridging two foes who are unable to see the other’s point of view.

3) Summits can build trust 

Face-to-face diplomacy can ultimately transform relationships, turning enemies into partners, by building trust. Nicholas Wheeler argues that face-to-face diplomacy allows leaders to test an intuition that another leader is trustworthy.

The face-to-face diplomacy between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, beginning with the November 1985 Geneva summit, illustrates this process. Upon shaking hands with Gorbachev for the first time, Reagan later recalled, he “looked into his smile” and sensed that he “had been right and felt a surge of optimism.” Wheeler argues that these interactions ultimately led to both sides trusting each other enough that they no longer considered the risks entailed with cooperating.

Testing trustworthiness through face-to-face interaction is not foolproof. After meeting Vladimir Putin at the 2001 Slovenia Summit, George W. Bush famously declared, “I was able to get a sense of his soul.” But U.S.-Russian relations soon deteriorated. Historical examples of high-profile summits that go wrong, from Munich to Yalta, loom large.

4) Intelligence provides important context in face-to-face meetings

Since Kim came to power, the CIA has probably produced dozens of intelligence assessments of the young North Korean leader. Those assessments should be of great interest to presidents in general but are particularly valuable before a face-to-face meeting.

Indeed, as Holmes and Yarhi-Milo note, before convening the Camp David summit, Carter pored over psychological profiles of Begin and Sadat. By Carter’s own admission, these profiles helped him understand how to approach, persuade and maneuver the leaders into accepting a negotiated settlement.

In recent months, Trump has been at odds with the intelligence community and reportedly doesn’t schedule regular presidential briefings. But Trump’s new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, a former CIA director, recently met with Kim. And Trump also met with South Korean President Moon Jae-in this week to discuss the negotiations.

With today’s news about the summit, these insights — and the potential benefits of a face-to-face meeting between Trump and Kim — seem on hold.