Gary Horton is entitled to his opinion about Donald Trump’s North Korea policy. That is what an opinion column is for. But an argument is more persuasive when readers are given the relevant facts, including the ones that complicate the writer’s position. In his Aug. 19 column, “Palling Around with Terrorists — for Real,” Horton leaves out several of those facts while presenting Trump’s relationship with Kim Jong Un in the darkest possible light.
There is a real policy question surrounding Trump’s decision to reduce military exercises with South Korea. North Korea is a hostile, nuclear-armed country, and South Korea is a longtime U.S. ally that we are committed by treaty to defend. If reducing those exercises weakens deterrence, make that case. But negotiating with Kim, even trying to establish a personal relationship with him, is not the same thing as endorsing him. Presidents sometimes have to deal with dangerous adversaries.
Barack Obama understood this when he met Raúl Castro in 2015. Cuba was still designated by the U.S. as a state sponsor of terrorism and, according to the State Department, was not removed from that list until May. If Horton wrote a column accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists,” I missed it. I would not have agreed if he had. Obama was conducting diplomacy with an adversarial government because he believed it served U.S. interests. Why should it become sinister when Trump does it?
An even more striking omission is Horton’s own view of Trump and Kim in 2018. After their first summit, Horton wrote in The Signal that Trump was “very correct to open channels with North Korea and build peace.” Kim was already a dictator, and North Korea was already nuclear-armed and back on the state-sponsor-of-terrorism list. Horton understood then that Trump was using a personal relationship as a diplomatic tool. Eight years later, the same approach is “palling around with terrorists.”
Horton also treats Trump’s talk about good personal relationships as evidence he is too deferential to foreign leaders. Yet that has not prevented Trump from applying pressure. Argentine President Javier Milei is one of Trump’s most enthusiastic foreign allies, but Argentina was still subject to Trump’s tariff policies and later negotiated with the U.S. over trade. Trump ordered major strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen in 2025 and later ordered strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. Those actions hardly describe a president who becomes a pushover because he says he has a good relationship with someone.
Trump’s foreign-policy record also includes results missing from Horton’s account. His administration brokered the Abraham Accords, establishing normal relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. At the 2025 NATO summit in The Hague, the allies committed to investing 5% of gross domestic product annually on defense-related needs by 2035, after years of Trump pressing them to spend more. His approach does not always work, but neither is the record one diplomatic failure after another.
The same selective history appears when Horton asks what Trump’s diplomacy with Kim “bought us” and points to North Korea’s closer relationship with Russia. Moscow and Pyongyang had substantial ties long before Trump entered the White House. Reuters reported in 2012 that Russia agreed to write off 90% of North Korea’s roughly $11 billion Soviet-era debt. Their military partnership became far more important after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and needed weapons and manpower. North Korea has supplied Russia with weapons and thousands of troops, some of whom fought Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk region. Horton offers no evidence that Trump’s earlier diplomacy with Kim caused that development.
Trump’s diplomacy did not denuclearize North Korea, and reducing military exercises with South Korea may prove to be a mistake. Those are fair subjects for criticism. What is less persuasive is presenting only the facts that support the darkest interpretation while leaving out the ones that complicate it. Readers are entitled to enough of the story to decide whether a columnist’s conclusions hold up. The standard for diplomacy should not change depending on whether the president doing the talking is Barack Obama or Donald Trump.
Otherwise, it starts to look like Horton hears what he wants to hear.
Arthur Tom
Valencia
