This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 12, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

The President says he will meet with North Korean leader in

the leader of the hermit kingdom.

How did this meeting come together?

Why wasn't the State Department involved?

What should be the focus?

And what happens if it goes well or goes poorly?

Cato's Doug Bandau and John Glaser comment.

When we think of President's meeting with world leaders, particularly important world leaders for the first time,

there's a lot that has to go into this in order to get that meeting set up.

Do we know anything about the channels that were used to establish this meeting between

Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. As far as we can tell there were no

channels directly between the White House or Washington and Pyongyang.

Everything so far has occurred through South Korea, all of the discussion, all of the statements

about what Kim Jong-un has offered, everything

has come through North Korea.

So we have yet to have a clear statement from the North Koreans indicating an invitation

to what they want out of this.

So this is really extraordinary.

You almost always have very serious preparatory work between the parties as opposed to kind of an

instantaneous invitation coming through a third party

between two countries that have had very little contact directly.

...