CLAUDIA ROSETT: Little Rocket Man’s Great Big Summit Scam.

This plan is now being widely hailed as a historic step forward; a triumph for Trump’s campaign of coralling Pyongyang with “maximum pressure.” It’s historic all right, but there’s an enormous hazard that it’s a step right into the same old North Korean trap.

North Korea has a record of deceit that includes not only the series of broken nuclear deals over the past 24 years, but the surprise invasion of South Korea way back in 1950, with which Kim Jong’s grandfather, founding tyrant Kim Il Sung, triggered the 1950-53 Korean War. The totalitarian character of the regime itself — a system built on brute force, threats and lies — ought to warn us that Kim’s goal in proposing a summit is not to surrender to maximum pressure, but to deflate it, via assorted diplomatic stunts. All the better for Kim to regroup and carry on with North Korea’s predatory projects, global rackets and nuclear missile program. (Forget the idea that Kim might be suddenly looking to repent his murderous ways and scrap his totalitarian system; odds are, his own gotesquely abused citizenry would seize the chance to kill him.)

Already, with this plan for a summit, Kim is gaming the mighty United States. For an American president to agree to a sitdown with North Korea’s tyrant is not a coup for the U.S., it’s a concession. When the elected leader of the Free World sits down with a totalitarian dictator to bargain as equals, it dignifies the dictator, not the democrat.

Read the whole thing, but given that Kim has put much on the table (even if he doesn’t mean it) and Trump hasn’t, for now I’m more sanguine on the talks than Claudia is.