When you walk away it's difficult to come back

So Donald Trump walked out of his second summit with Kim Jong-un, ended the meeting prematurely and cancelled a planned lunch. It all sounds tough stuff, the Big Man refusing to kowtow to the short fat bloke. But when you walk out of a meeting because you are not getting what you want, it just makes it more difficult to get back in the room again at a later date. It's not like the classic carpet-seller routine when a would-be buyer walks out of the shop unwilling pay the price offered and is half way down the street when the carpet seller comes running out and shouting "Ok ok you can have the carpet at your price". When Trump walked out, Kim Jong-un made no attempt to call him back in, let alone shout out, "Ok ok you can have my nukes!". The question now is, not what went wrong with all the pre-summit planning, but what happens next. If Kim demanded a total lifting of sanctions before even considering removing some of his nuclear installations, what will persuade him or Trump to come back for a third summit? It's a Catch-22 situation. Trump wants all of Kim's nukes dismantled. Kim wants all sanctions lifted. Unless there is a bit of give and take on both sides, there is unlikely to be any deal at all in the future. The looks on the faces of both leaders summed up the problem. They claim to like each other, but the solemn downbeat expressions made it clear friendship is not going to be enough. Kim has spent too much of his country's income on building a nuclear arsenal to give it all up just because the leader of the free world asks him to do so. On the assumption that Kim is never going to give up ALL his nukes but might give up, say, half of them, is this ever going to be enough for Trump or some future US president to agree to lift, say, half the economic sanctions. That would normally be the half-way stage of any serious negotiations. But this is different from most negotiations because it's about nuclear weapons that threaten world peace. Trump can hardly say, in private or especially in public, "Ok Kim, I'll allow you to keep 20 nuclear warheads and three nuclear installations and eight ballistic missiles, and in return I'll help you build your economy." North Korea would eventually thrive as an economy but would still be a nuclear power. In the nuclear game it has to be all or nothing. That's why Trump walked out. And that's why it's going to be so difficult for Trump and Kim to get back into a room together. It doesn't bode well.

Kim Jong-un prefers his nukes to a flourishing economy

Donald Trump believes he has found the perfect answer to Kim Jong-un's intransigence: give up your nukes and the US will help you build the fastest upward-moving economy since, well, since South Korea and Vietnam. Perhaps he has in mind a huge Trump resort on the coast and half a dozen Trump golf courses. But surely there is a fatal flaw to this solution. Do Kim and his family really want to improve the lives of their citizens or do they want above all else to stay in power and benefit from the luxuries that come their way through illegal deals with countries who don't care about international sanctions? North Korea old hands will have tried to get the message across to the White House that promising a glowing economy isn't going to cut it with Kim. Has he ever shown sympathy for the rural workers who barely eek out an existence on poverty income? Does he want North Korea to be another South Korea or Vietnam? It's a nice try but Kim comes from a ruthless dynastic dictatorship with an appalling human rights record. He wants total power and he must worry that if he agrees to Trump's plan and turns North Korea into an economic miracle, in return for surrendering his nukes, what leverage will he have over his potential enemies at home and overseas? He needs his nukes and long-range ballistic missiles. When Trump has gone will his successor be as nice to him? I fear these sorts of questions are running around in Kim's head and he won't move towards denuclearisation unless the US agrees to withdraw all 28,500 troops from South Korea. He knows China will be on his side because it's very much in Beijing's interest for the US military to disappear from the region. I want this summit in Hanoi to be a success, I would love to hear Kim say he will dismantle all of his nukes and missiles and open up his country to outside investment. But every time I see Kim smiling or waving from a train window, I feel he is exactly the same person he was when he was test-firing nuclear-capable missiles in 2017. Is he excited by the prospect of having Walmart supermarkets estalishing themselves across North Korea and Starbucks on every street corner in Pyongyang? No he is not. Because if his people get too used to prosperity and enjoying life they might turn against him and his military henchmen. So Kim will keep his nukes as his permanent insurance policy.

Theresa May's Brexit deal or No Brexit At All.

We have come round full circle so many times with the Brexit negotiations and divisions and options and disagreements that I would like to think we Brits now have two options facing us before March 29: Thesesa May's deal with added stuff that won't mean much from the EU and then a chance for a popular or parliamentary vote on whether to scrap the whole thing and stay in the EU. According to a story in the New York Times, there is just one word that sums up what has been going on between Brit and EU negotiators in Brussels in recent weeks: NOTHING. I have a terrible feeling this is true. May and her acolytes just go round and round with the same old arguments about the Northern Ireland backstop and the EU bureaucrats come up the same old fatuous pledges about writing a legal letter or addendum which basically says, "Don't worry, the backstop won't last for ever, we promise, but we can't put an exact timetable limit to it because without this insurance policy everything else falls by the wayside." So if nothing has really moved to help Thesesa May get her deal through Parliment, then when the vote is held again next month she will be defeated again. Now she has said that if she is defeated she will allow a vote on whether to keep a no-deal Brexit on the table, and assuming 90 per cent of MPs vote in favour of abolishing the no-deal option, the next option will be a vote on whether to delay the Brexit leaving date of March 29 to sometime in June to give more time for negotiations. But sorry, it doesn't matter whether the exit is delayed for three months or six months or a year, nothing is going to change radically to make Theresa May's deal look significantly different (better). What's the point of delaying the exit date? The prime minister hates the idea of delaying it because she feels personally obligated to fulfill the maority of the people's wish which is to leave the EU on March 29. Jeremy Corbyn's five-point solution to Brexit - leaving the EU but not really - is meaningless because, whatever my personal feelings about it, it is effectively a total surrender to the EU, a treacherous snub to the people who voted to leave, and it will emasculate Britain's powers for ever within the European community. I travelled back from Spain today and before we took off a very loud argument broke out between a bloke behind me and another bloke across the aisle. All about Brexit. The guy across the aisle who was garrulous to a fault, wafted on about why the UK should stay in the EU, which was too much for the big guy behind me who shouted for the other chap to get real and what about the meaning of democracy and basically told him to bugger off and leave democracy to take its course. Everyone started to get uncomfortable. It made me realise that probably if the UK fails to leave the EU on March 29, my friend behind will be marching to Parliament Square to protest. Along with 17 million others. Spurred on by the garrulous bloke who didn't stop talking the whole flight, the big fella behind me said it was nonsense that mayhem would follow if we left the EU without a deal. So I am somewhat wary of mentioning the one option which we could and should take which is to let Parliament vote between two options: Theresa's deal or no Brexit. Simples, as Mrs May said in Parliament today. Everyone says the May deal is a bad deal so the only alternative is to stay in the EU and forget all this democracy rubbish!!! Apologies to the fella sitting behind me on the plane. And to the fast and furious Leavers/Brexiteers, stop thinking of yourselves and think of the next generation who want to stay European.

Kim Jong-un lookalike told to leave the country

Easily the funniest story of the day - although not funny for the individual concerned - is the decision by the Hanoi government to fly a Kim Jong-un lookalike out of the country while the real Kim Jong-un is in the Vietnamese capital to meet Donald Trump. Howard X, a resident of Hong Kong, so resembles the North Korean leader and sounds like him that the Vietnamese authorities decided it was just too risky to have him around and spoiling the impact of the summit. He had already appeared on television alongside a Trump lookalike pretending to be at a summit. It must have been hilarious. Perhaps some viewers thought it was the real thing. Anyway it was all too much for the Hanoi government whose reputation as a summit host was at stake. So Howard x suddenly found he had a visa that had run out and he was "escorted" to the aiport under orders to stay away. The Trump lookalike was allowed to stay but told to remain out of the public limelight. No TV interviews. This could never happen in the US or the UK. Any incoming foreign leader has to take the rough with the smooth, the serious with the hilarious. Poor old Trump had a big fat balloon shaped like him as a baby in a nappy hanging over Parliament Square when he was last in London. I said at the time I thought this was very disrespectful but if you're in a democracy I guess you have to put up with that sort of nonsense. Anyway Howard X has had his 15 minutes of fame and I expect he will soon be back on the TV somewhere impersonating Kim Jong-un, although not in Vietnam. Meanwhile Trump (the real one I think) and Kim will be getting down to business. If they don't achieve very much, perhaps the two impersonators can be brought back to sort out the world!

Maduro and his 2,000 corrupt generals must go

Why is the whole world not condemning Nicola Maduro? How can Putin actually support this monster who is desroying his country and killing his own citizens? When Bashar Assad started killing his people in the civil war in Syria there was worldwide outrage. But here we have a so-called leader of a country doing everything he can to stop the outside world from helping his people with food and medicine, even burning the aid which is totally outrageous and sickening. Some of his soldiers have defected, but just a handful. The only way forward now is for the military from the top to the bottom to rebel and escort Maduro and his henchmen from their residences. But in dictatorships like Venezuela, there is the fear of the unknown. When middle-ranking officers have defected and have tried to engineer a coup they have failed, and the price of failure in Venezuela has terrible consequences. People act when they know for sure that everyone around them is going to act as well. But in an envronment of fear, you can never be sure. This is why the 25 or so soldiers who have refused to act against the people have made a brave but pointless gesture. The military as a whole needs to rebel. This is what the US is counting on. But there seems no sign of mass defections, and the 2,000 generals in the Venezuelan army are so cosseted from the suffering experienced by the rest of the population that they have no incentive to turn against Maduro. He is their protector and provider. By the way, how is it possible that in an army of only about 67,000 active soldiers there are 2,000 generals? What on earth do they do every day, other than check on their bulging bank accounts? I fear that something terrible is going to break in Venezuela. At some point there is going to be a massive confrontation between the military and the people, and spurred on by Maduro and the 2,000 corrupt generals, there will be large-scale casualties. Then, pehaps then, the world will act, or more specifically the US will act, and Putin will have to be warned in the strongest terms to keep out!

Will Trump and Kim Jong-un achieve anything in Hanoi?

The only person in Washington who seems to be optimistic about next week's second summit with Kim Jong-un is President Donald Trump. Unless he knows something which none of us or any of his most senior officials know, then Trmp is due for a big disapointment. I genuinely hope that the sceptics are wrong and Trump's unreal but apparently genuine liking for the North Korean leader will bear some fruit at the meeting in Hanoi. But it is difficult to be too hopeful because since the first summit in Singapore last June there has been very little progress, in fact pretty well nil progress towards the ultimate goal of denuclearisation. This inevitably raises the question: Is Kim Jong-un ready to get rid of his nuclear weapons or is he just tring to bamboozle Trump by flashing his smile in the hope that he can persuade the president to offer some nice juicy concessions, such as lifting some of the sanctions which have been hitting his country's economy. Trump has said all along that sanctions will not be lifted until AFTER all the North Korean nukes have gone. But no one who knows North Korea from way back believes Kim is ready to do that at any stage in the near future and probably never. Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, who started off being very bullish about the prospects for denuclearisation is now by all accounts gripped by reality and feels the Hanoi summit might just turn out to be window-dressing. This would be depressing indeed. Trump has obviously been warned not to give anything away and to make sure that Kim makes more than just general promises about denuclearisation. The truth is that North Korea is not as dangerous as it was because not that long ago Kim was threatening to launch long-range missiles at the US and was talking about setting off a hydrogen bomb in the atmosphere over the Pacific. There has been no such talk since the Singapore summit and I don't believe Kim will utter such warlike rhetoric in Trump's presence in Hanoi. So, taking that as a positive, what we need from Hanoi is some sort of timetable for denuclearisation, linked to sanctions-lifting and a formal ending of the war between North and South Korea. A timetable, signed by both Trump and Kim, will increase the chances of an eventual breakthrough that actually does lead to nuclear warheads being dismantled. It could happen, and despite the pessimism in Washington, especially from that old warhorse John Bolton, the national security adviser, Trump's "special" relationship with Kim might deliver the goods.

Will Putin want Trump to win a second term?

It would be fascinating to attend a Kremlin session between Vladimir Putin and his tightest net of cronies when they discuss Trump Part Two. Does Putin want Trump in the White House for a second term and, if so, what will he do to help him get there? According to the US intelligence community, Putin did everything he could to get Trump into the White House in 2016, presumably in the expectation that Trump and not Hillary Clinton wohld be more conducive to improved relations between Washington and Moscow. But since then, relations between Trump and Putin have got so bad that they have returned to Cold War-style rhetoric. So why would Putin want Trump for another four years in 2020? Well, despite the on-the-surface deterioration in relations, Trump still hopes to get on with Putin and still hopes that the two can be friends. I think Putin knows that and would much prefer to have someone like Trump to deal with than, say, Kamala Harris or Joe Biden or any of the multitude of other Democratic presidential hopefuls. So watch out Kamala and Joe, expect some Kremlin trouble over the next two years. Putin is probably saying to all his insider cronies, "let's make sure we can help Trump as much as possible". Robert Mueller, special counsel, is supposed to be on the verge of producing his report on the collusion allegation and I'm sure that whatever conclusions he comes to, Moscow will be ready to dismiss any suggestion of a plot as nonsense. Trump of course will also have his "witchunt and fake news" explanation ready to go. So, bizarrely. some people might say that will be another example of Moscow and the White House indirectly working together! What Mueller says will be crucial, but the real threat facing Trump and his hopes for a 2020 reelection is the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. Post-Mueller the Nancy Pelosi phenomenon will take off. So far she has restrained her colleagues from launching immediately into an impeachment drive. But if Mueller leans towards the collusion argument, the House will accelerate its own investigations and it will be a torrid time for the president. He will need all the friends he can get, and Putin might be one of them.