International security

‘They Want to Know If Trump’s Crazy’

For years, DiMaggio and Joel Wit, a longtime U.S. diplomat turned scholar at Johns Hopkins University who founded the influential North Korea-watching website 38North, have been quietly meeting with North Koreans to talk about the country’s nuclear program. In the past they hardly acknowledged the conversations, part of a “Track 2” dialogue that has kept a line open to the isolated dictatorship even when the two governments officially were not on speaking terms.

But that was before Trump.

In their meetings with the North Koreans since Trump was elected, DiMaggio and Wit watched their growing alarm and confusion as an initial outreach after the election testing U.S. reaction to new nuclear talks descended into a Trumpian fury of name-calling, mutual recriminations and military escalation. Now she and Wit are speaking out despite their past reluctance even to acknowledge the North Korean meetings, describing them in a recent New York Times op-ed and adding new detail in this week’s episode of our Global Politico podcast. “I don’t normally talk about my ‘Track 2’ work in such a public way,” DiMaggio tweeted. “But these are far from normal times.”