North Korea Nuclear Deal

Will Trump get a successful deal from the North Koreans? Of course he will, and at least in his telling, it will be the greatest deal ever made. How can it be that the man with no plan might do something no other president in 20 years was able to?

First, the deal won't be his; it will be whatever the North, the South and China want. His only accomplishment is getting them to sit down to talks. And since he has no plan and his goal is only to put something, anything, on the score board that he can point to and say "look what I did", the terms are largely immaterial. So how did Trump get the parties to the table?

Kim agreed to the talks because he has a nuclear weapon and a delivery system and is negotiating from a fairly strong position.  What about the South? They likely felt that Trump was so unpredictable that the US could no longer be relied on. Trump might on a whim pull troops out of South Korea leaving it exposed to invasion from the North. So better make a deal quickly before something worse happens. As for China, North Korea will be less of a problem when it is less economically isolated and the lifting of sanctions will reduce the likelihood of mass migration from the North into China. The only part of the calculus Trump changed was sowing doubt in the South's leaders' minds that the US was a reliable ally; quite an accomplishment! 

Second, don't be fooled into thinking that the JCPOA, aka the Iran deal, represents the minimum acceptable set of terms. Trump doesn't really care about the details of the deal. He hated the Iran deal because it was Obama's not because he really thought it was a bad deal; he almost certainly doesn't know either the details of the deal or its implementation. As long as the North and South agree to something and China blesses it, he will trumpet it as a victory he, personally, the great negotiator, delivered. What will he have had to do with it? "How about everything" he will yell at anyone foolish enough to listen. 

The talks will conclude; Trump will declare victory; and the situation on the ground may be little changed other than the lifting of economic sanctions on the North.