Distracting and caving

President Trump is getting ready to cave: having scheduled a Summit with Kim Jong-un for next Wednesday and Thursday in Hanoi he is now talking about another with Xi Jingping next month. Both Summits are intended to distract from judicial investigations and portend deals: with Kim on North Korea’s nuclear weapons and with Xi on trade.

Get ready, America. Your pocket is going to be picked.

No doubt there will be a flashy announcement or two. Kim might agree to destroy some nuclear facilities and sign a peace agreement formally ending the Korean war, which is something he, his father, and grandfather have assiduously sought. President Trump will tout it as a great victory. With new tariffs postponed until the summit, Xi can easily agree to buy more US soybeans, another great victory. But that is the penny ante stuff.

Real concessions would have to include Kim accounting for all his fissionable material, agreeing to dismantle and surrender his nuclear weapons, and allowing International Atomic Energy Agency inspections permanently. Xi would have to end Chinese insistence on technology transfer from US companies and cyber theft of intellectual property. There is no sign that these US goals will be achieved. They may even be unachievable.

In Venezuela, too, Trump is losing, at least for now. His effort to weaponize US aid by assembling it on the borders and daring President Maduro to prevent it from entering ended Saturday in violent confrontation. Despite the defection of dozens of Venezuelan troops, only two trucks managed to get into the country. The Venezuelan security forces are so far remaining mostly loyal.

The Americans are threatening Maduro with consequences, but at least for now his hold on power seems tight. Trump has pretty good support from across the political spectrum for his effort to unseat Maduro, but any move towards military intervention would quickly shatter the consensus. Trump may not cave to Maduro, but it is unclear whether he can somehow get the Venezuelan President to step aside without a serious rift over war powers in the US Congress.

Trump’s effort to distract attention from various judicial investigations with international summits is not likely to work. Special Counsel Mueller, despite the rumors, is not yet finished. He needs to do something about Donald Jr. and likely Jared Kushner before folding his tent. Mueller continues to hide his hand on the Russia investigation: all the pertinent material was redacted last Friday from the sentencing memo he submitted concerning former campaign chair Paul Manafort, whose connections to Moscow are manifold.

So what we’ve got is an Administration trying hard with Venezuela, North Korea, and China to distract attention, even if that means far from satisfactory negotiating outcomes with Pyongyang and Beijing as well as a perilous game of chicken with Caracas.