Kim Jong Un Wants to Join Trump’s Club

The U.S.-North Korea confrontation is nearing another tense inflection point, with North Korea signaling that it could be ready for negotiations with Washington soon, even as it moves toward becoming a full nuclear-weapons power.

When such diplomatic standoffs get resolved, it’s often by allowing each country to claim it’s entering negotiations on its own terms. In this case, North Korea would assert its status as a nuclear-weapons state, while the United States would insist the dialogue was about eventual denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. This may sound like an unbridgeable divide, but that’s what diplomacy is for.

But as 2017 nears its end, the two countries still appear to be on a collision course. Kim Jong Un’s bellicose rhetoric matches President Trump’s. There’s an odd mutual fascination, too, which one foreign diplomat describes as “love/hate.”