TED ANTHONY, AP
BANGKOK (AP) — In one corner: the unpredictable dictator, the third-generation family ruler whose nation has a seven-decade reputation of being erratic, quick to take umbrage and insistent that it is powerful enough to upend the planet. In the other corner: a sandpaper-tongued American president like no other, barely past his first 100 days as leader of the free world, liable to say just about anything — including a handful of conciliatory words at the most unexpected of moments.
On Monday, those conciliatory words from the mouth of Donald Trump included some extraordinary ones about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, long an object of American scorn and suspicion.
There were these words from Trump: "Obviously, he's a pretty smart cookie."
And, even more so, there were these: "If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him," Trump told Bloomberg News, "I would absolutely, I would be honored to do it."
Wow, says an astonished world: What if?
In the annals of diplomatic history, such a tete-a-tete, unlikely as it is, would tumble into a category that offers few possible comparisons.
There are the ones that never happened — Roosevelt sitting down with Hitler during World War II, George Bush (whichever one) facing Saddam Hussein while in office. And there are those that did: Kennedy meeting Khrushchev in Vienna, Nixon arriving in Beijing at the dawn of the U.S.-China thaw and immediately heading to a meeting with Mao.
Even those, however, were before many things we take for granted today — perhaps most notably the internet, live television and the instantaneous social-media pipelines that Trump knows and uses so fluidly.
The notion of a substantive sit-down between two of the most gazed-upon figures of this moment in the planet's history is a staggering prospect — and a potential logistical nightmare if the two countries ever tried to make it happen.
Presuming that such a trial balloon is to be taken seriously, what, in fact, would it take to pull off? The loose contours of it could play out as follows:
THE VENUE
Possible locations could include the DMZ, which would be about as cinematic a piece of drama as human geopolitics could offer up, with a room featuring negotiation tables that sit halfway in the North and halfway in the South.
The benefit of this location would be the presence of existing security. It's already the nucleus of one of the most tense patches of the planet, and it's effectively already wired for such an event. Somewhere in China would be a possible, though highly unlikely, location as well.
But could it be elsewhere? Perhaps famously neutral Switzerland, where the now-infrequent world traveler Kim Jong Un almost certainly spent part of his upbringing attending school? Could it possibly even be the White House, where Trump has already caused uproars by hosting the president of Egypt and by calling the president of Turkey, both perceived in the West as hardly the most robust upholders of American values. That would be highly controversial and even more unlikely — just getting Kim a visa would be an interesting proposition — but stranger things have happened.