The West’s policy toward North Korea has been a failure – Trump’s made the right decision to overturn it

The news of President Trump agreeing to meet the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un takes me straight back to a cold February evening in 1985 in Washington. I was saying goodbye in the Tabard Inn at Dupont Circle to my friend, Christopher Hitchens, who was about to fly to Seoul along with US congressmen and trade unionists, including the innovative US autoworkers international affairs director, Don Stillman, who were accompanying Kim Dae-jung, the Nelson Mandela of the Korean peninsula, back to his homeland.

It was a risk for Kim and Hitch as two years before the Filipino opposition leader, Benny Aquino, had been gunned down as he got off a plane at Manila having returned from exile.

Kim DJ as he was known had carried the banner of Korean democracy during the long years of military dictatorship. He narrowly missed a Korean CIA assassination attempt in 1971. He was a Catholic and a strong appeal by Pope John Paul II to Ronald Reagan and the Korean generals got him out of the country.

His return from exile in 1985 was a boost to the growing democratic opposition in South Korea.

Two years later in 1987, a wave of occupation strikes combined with relentless student protests forced the military to give way ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics and South Korea has been a democracy ever since.

As Labour Foreign Secretary after 1997, Robin Cook, offered diplomatic recognition to North Korea, a bold act of innovative diplomacy at a time when the country might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.

I was FCO minister in charge of relations with Korea and received their delegations. One minister spoke fluent German so we spent the whole official lunch at Lancaster House chatting in German to the horror of both his and the UK officials, half of them spooks, who could not understand a word we said.

Kim Dae Jung and other of the more intelligent leaders South Korea tried to develop a politics of outreach to the North rather like the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt in the 1970s with its outreach to East Germany which began the process of the re-unification of Europe and the liberation of East Europe from Stalinist ideology.

The fascinating aspect of the idea of a Trump-Kim Jong-un meeting is whether it will be just some show-boating by Trump as he tries to cover himself in Nixon-in-China glory or whether it really can begin a process of reunifying the Korean peninsula.

The US and North Korea did talk about nuclear weapons in the 1990s and after 2000, the UK embassy was a vital transmission post for confidential information from Pyongyang to Washington.

But this went desperately wrong with the West’s regime change intervention policy in the Middle East. It was not so much Iraq and Saddam Hussein as the fate of Colonel Gaddafi. The Libyan dictator had abased himself before Bush and Blair, promised to give up all WMD, worked with London on the trial of those responsible for the Lockerbie mass slaughter and did just about everything to be cooperative with Washington, London and Paris.

Yet in 2011, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy poured military resources into an intervention that resulted in Gaddafi being dragged out and shot like a dog. Pyongyang also looked on with horror at Cameron and Hague joining in the move to topple Bashir al Assad in Syria.

The former Labour MEP, Glynn Ford, had visited North Korea thirty times and his son, Alessandro, even did a gap year in Pyongyang. No one in Britain knows North Korea better. Ford says that the Cameron era interventions terrified Kim Jong-un and the North Korean leadership. “The lesson that North Korea learned was that the problem wasn’t having weapons of mass destruction, but rather not having them. Its nuclear experiments were transformed from optional to essential.”

Theresa May has continued this adventurism with the RAF taking part in exercises with the US and South Korea military based on attacks on targets in the North. Any assault on North Korea would see Seoul, a few miles from the border, reduced to ashes with more than a million dead.

Now Trump has over-turned the recent western line best expressed by the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, who told Conservative MPs in December that King Jong-un would soon have the capability to launch a missile strike at the UK.

The key player is the left-liberal South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, who has toned down the bellicose rhetoric of previous right-wing South Korean leaders and wants to move back to the Kim Dae-jung détente style politics.

The paradox of the reunification of Germany was that it happened on Ronald Reagan’s and the George H Bush’s watch – two men not suspected of being liberal or keen on commie hugging.

Trump loves grand strokes and bringing in North Korea from the cold would be a foreign policy win that puts him in to history in a way that neither of his predecessors in the 21^st century White House managed after the Iraq disaster and the serial disappointments of Obama foreign policy.

Denis MacShane worked with trade unions in South Korea 1987-1994 and was FCO Minister responsible for Korea 2001-2003