There on Wednesday and Thursday this week.....I sat and watched the evening news with ARD and ZDF (the two public networks of Germany)....watching the 8 PM news with ARD and the 9:45 PM news with ZDF (the more extended business). Both wanted to seriously hype the cancellation of the Trump-Kim meeting, by President Trump.
The theme? Well....true international diplomacy was violated, and President Trump obviously is not capable of diplomacy.
Various people came and went in short video-clips to announce that the finer points of diplomacy were simply not understood, and that the art of international relations was something that Team-Trump was not capable of grasping.
At the conclusion of these, I went back to the London Telegraph, the Brit newspaper Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, and three or four other independent news groups. Basically, they all led to the simple short story. Kim's team was supposed to show up for a pre-summit meeting in Singapore, and they failed to show. No excuses were provided....they just never did show up. The Trump-team sat there a bit bewildered and then left.
There's this odd German trait that I often hype upon. If some German (a dentist or social office person) gives you an appointment to be somewhere on Thursday at 9:00 AM.....you 'damn-well' need to be there. And no, just being 20 minutes late because of parking issues is not a legit excuse (they will tell you that).
In the American business world, if there is some big meeting scheduled between two corporate giants....a pre-meeting with junior officers of both companies will occur....to ensure that the topics are laid out and the boss isn't standing there with some other guy....with a zero-topic agenda on their hands.
So I look back at the ARD and ZDF attempt to tell this story, and kinda wonder.....why not mention that the North Korean team simply refused to show up for the pre-summit meeting? Instead, you got twenty-odd minutes of fake hype over some dramatic topic of 'fine art' diplomacy that means mostly nothing. In their scenario, you would have sat there in a half-empty room....sipping fine coffee and talking over your latest cinema experience, and along about the end of the second day....admire that your other team never showed up. Everyone would pat each other on the back, and you'd go home to talk about the successful pre-summit meeting which would have gone well....if the other guys had shown up.
The problem now? Well....Kim's folks hint that the summit is back on track, and might still occur on schedule. How will the ZDF and ARD news folks explain this to the German public? Yes, that's a curious question. The 'fine art' of Trump diplomacy might be something difficult to explain.
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