Klobuchar on Trump’s North Korea visit: Diplomacy is not like ‘bringing a hot dish over the fence to the dictator next door’

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), a 2020 White House hopeful, on Sunday sounded a skeptical tone about President Trump’s historic meeting with Kim Jong Un on North Korean soil and said the president is taking an overly simplistic approach to diplomacy.

“We want to see a denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, a reduction in these missiles but it’s not as easy as just going and, you know, bringing a hot dish over the fence to the dictator next door,” Klobuchar said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“This is a ruthless dictator and when you go forward, you have to have clear focus and a clear mission and clear goals,” she said.

Trump on Sunday became the first American president to travel to North Korea, which some of his allies are touting as a breakthrough moment that could accelerate negotiations to persuade North Korea to give up nuclear weapons.

But Klobuchar predicted that little is likely to come out of the president’s meeting with the North Korean leader.

“We’ve seen a history here, especially in this case where Donald Trump announces these summits and nothing really comes out of it,” Klobuchar said.

She noted that an earlier meeting between Trump and Kim in Singapore in June of 2018, which the president at the time touted as a major accomplishment, did little to change North Korea’s disregard of international law.

“The president will meet with him, that’s fine. It’s always good to talk to people when you’re dealing with something so important as nuclear weapon but then we have no clear path and nothing comes out of it,” Klobuchar said.

“But let’s be honest here. In May, they were launching missiles into the sea in violation of the [United Nations] resolution,” she said, referring to North Korea’s testing of several ballistic missiles in violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution.