While Korea experts were discussing privately and publicly their assumptions about how North Korea’s history of breaking past agreements might be coloring their assessments, and whether there were signposts of real change in Pyongyang’s approach, the only person who apparently wasn’t questioning anything was President Trump himself. In fact, his seemingly unwavering confidence that he could solve the North Korea problem once and for all, where other presidents had failed, could well have been rooted in his mirror-imaging—the notion that he knew what would work with Kim because, ultimately, he was like Trump or like the many businessmen with whom Trump had worked in the past.
Former CIA officer Richards Heuer described mirror-imaging as a situation where an individual “fill[s] gaps in…assuming that the other side is likely to act in a certain way because that is how the US would act under similar circumstances.” Because Heuer found that “a constant source of problems in intelligence analysis” was the “failure to understand that others perceive their national interests differently from the way we perceive those interests,” within the intelligence community, our decision-making had inherent guardrails and safety nets—diverse opinions, creativity, structured analytic thinking processes, and depth of expertise, not to mention the input of policymakers who would challenge our analysis. Our jobs also required a constant shifting of perspectives, including interpreting an event and the other side’s intentions from a foreign leader’s point of view.
“Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open,” Heuer wrote. President Trump was willing to try something different, jettisoning conventional guidance about not rewarding the North Korean leader with a summit, as had been done in past administrations, for dealing with Kim directly, to tease out how denuclearization could be advanced. Trump’s unconventional approach in his willingness to pursue and test an alternative vision and change the paradigm of the relationship with North Korea was a reminder to seasoned analysts about the blinders of expertise. A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis, one of the reference documents familiar to all CIA analysts, warns that “seasoned analysts may be more susceptible to these mind-set problems as a result of their expertise and past success in using time-tested mental models.” The handbook also lists “the key risks of mind-sets”: “analysts perceive what they expect to perceive; once formed, [mind-sets] are resistant to change; new information is assimilated, sometimes erroneously, into existing mental models; and conflicting information is often dismissed or ignored.” Engaging directly with Kim, the top decision-maker in a highly centralized authoritarian state, was logical and made sense, especially since Kim made it clear that he alone controlled the nuclear weapons program.
But Trump had been making foreign policy in an erratic fashion, often without consulting his advisers, convinced by the mythology of his personal business acumen, which was cultivated by himself and bolstered by reality television producers whose economic motivations and quest for viewership converged with Trump’s own ego, that he alone knew what the best course of action was. As The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe observed, “By 2003 he had become a garish figure of local interest—a punch line….‘The Apprentice’ mythologized him anew, and on a much bigger scale, turning him into an icon of American success” despite the fact that Trump’s business had been on a sharp downhill slope. Trump dismissed reports from the CIA and other intelligence organizations, criticizing and swatting away their inconvenient assessments; meanwhile, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats testified in his annual threat assessment for 2019 that North Korea is “unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities,” which Kim considers “critical to the regime’s survival.” The media reported that Trump was “enraged” and considered the DNI as being “not loyal,” apparently for undercutting his more rosy outlook for engaging with Kim Jong Un.
Trump had consistently assessed his approach to Kim through the lens of a New York City businessman. In November 2017, when he addressed the South Korean National Assembly, Trump extolled the nation’s transformation from a devastated, war-torn country to an economic powerhouse—and the U.S. role in helping its advancements—and compared it to the North Korean “hell that no person deserves.” He promised that the United States was ready to show North Korea “a brighter path…if its leaders cease their threats and dismantle their nuclear program,” and, as it had with South Korea, Washington would partner with Pyongyang to achieve the same levels of economic success. In May 2018, he was more blunt, reassuring Kim