you want but that is not easy, especially at that age.”) Of course, Kim had the cushion of an existing nuclear weapons program, a propaganda machine that had been humming along since the 1950s that extolled his bloodline and provided legitimacy, and a father who made the appropriate introductions to key officials and institutions in advance, to help his son solidify his power. If 97 percent of Americans knew who Trump was, 100 percent of North Koreans knew who held the power in their country.
Both Trump and Kim appealed directly to the masses, an incongruity given their pampered backgrounds and gilded mansions. Trump did it through massive rallies and by reaching millions more with his Twitter account. Kim did it through his propaganda apparatus but also via his constant on-the-spot guidances, traversing the country to hug schoolchildren and inspect water parks, zoos, farms, and factories while reminding his officials to think of the people first. Trump “fancied himself a man of the people, more interested in the praise of cabdrivers and construction workers than in accolades from the rich and the powerful,” according to Kranish and Fisher. He won the admiration of middle- and lower-class Americans with his coarse language and insults against his opponents and the Washington “swamp.” His supporters “saw him as a straight-shooting billionaire who had the bucks and the brass to stand up to anyone.” For Kim, the execution of his uncle Jang and the steady drumbeat of purges were carried out not only to warn party and military officials to remember who they work for, but also to show the public that his crackdowns on the elite were on their behalf, to ensure that they knew they had an advocate in Kim.
As self-proclaimed champions of an idealized internal order, the two men have relied on rhetoric depicting a hostile outside world to reinforce that view of foreign relations. Pyongyang had long been inward-looking and suspicious of the outside world, while extolling the purity, optimism, and single-hearted unity and self-determination of the North Korean people and the state. North Korea requires a hostile outside world to legitimize the Kim dynasty, justify the military programs, and emphasize the belief in the populace that North Korea under Kim offers the only safe place, given the malevolent forces lurking outside. The United States is a constant, omnipresent threat, its big-nosed, rapacious soldiers ever ready to attack as soon as the North lets down its guard. The Chinese are untrustworthy, given Beijing’s support for sanctions against North Korea: One party official allegedly told a conference, “Although Japan is a century-old enemy, China is a thousand-year-old enemy.” Japan could not be trusted, of course, given the history of its colonization of the Korean Peninsula.
Donald Trump’s message about the world is similarly dystopian—it is a dark, dangerous place, where evil people are constantly trying to hurt Americans, their values, and their way of life, as they try to pick their pockets. In addition to adversaries like Iran and threats like terrorism, traditional allies, partners, and international organizations are also part of the problem—and targets of Trump’s transactional, zero-sum view of foreign relations and national security. After reviewing Trump’s statements and actions since the 1980s, Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution concluded that Trump is consistent in his thinking about foreign policy, which is mainly that America is overcommitted in the world. And to demonstrate his disgust at the overcommitment, he alienates his friends.
Take, for example, his attacks on the decades-old North Atlantic Treaty Organization, created amid the devastation of World War II to provide the United States, Canada, and Western Europe with collective security against the military threats posed by the Soviet Union. Trump bragged that “tens of billions of dollars more [are] pouring in because I would not allow member states to be delinquent in the payment while we guarantee their safety and are willing to fight wars for them. We have made [it] clear that countries that are immensely wealthy should reimburse the United States for the cost of defending them.” Trump questions key U.S. alliances in East Asia and repeatedly criticizes Seoul and Tokyo. Why do we have to help out Japan if it’s attacked (per the 1960 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the United States of America)? That didn’t seem fair to Trump. Of South Korea, he had once asked in 2013, “We have 25,000 soldiers over there protecting them. They don’t pay us. Why don’t they pay us?” He would return