A CLUB OF RIVALS

In the end, it took only five seconds to decide he liked him. After decades of deal making in the real estate business it was not difficult. “It's my touch, my feel, that's what I do”, Trump said. “I think very quickly I know whether or not something good is going to happen. And if I think it won't happen, I’m not going to waste my time.”

It had not looked quite so easy one year earlier, when Kim Jong-un was busy testing his long-range missile capability over the Pacific Ocean, a projection of his strength and power. In August 2017, Trump still tweeted that North Korea's nuclear threat “will be met with fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen”. And Kim, who Trump liked to refer to as “Little Rocket Man”, responded by calling the president a “mentally deranged dotard”.

War had seemed unavoidable. But when both leaders met in June 2018, on the island of Sentosa off the coast of Singapore, the turnaround was dramatic. When Kim had first floated the idea of a summit, foreign policy experts in Washington quickly agreed it would be a disastrous move. Trump's secretary of state Rex Tillerson, part of the “axis of adults” in the White House, advised against it. Any deal would need to be minutely prepared by professional negotiators. How else had Obama been able to get the Iran nuclear deal agreed?

But Trump rated himself as the world's number one dealmaker. The Iran deal he considered “the worst deal ever”. Tillerson, previously the CEO at ExxonMobil, was summarily sacked, by tweet. The president had decided to stonewall his foreign policy mandarins. For Trump, what mattered more than professional advice was his personal relationship with Kim. “This is all about leader vs leader”, he explained his motives to White House aides. “Man versus man. Me versus Kim.”