president agree to meet the leader there is a significant step for them. i think the easiest way to imagine it might be to think of fidel castro during his years in cuba. i'm not equating the two countries at all, but castro's cuba was also a problem to the u.s. for all those years. imagine if castro could have gotten a face to face meeting. that would have been a huge coup for the cuban regime, and i think similar with north korea. >> on the other hand, though, mr. fallows, nothing else has seemed to work. why not try to do something new, something different? do you think the president's unconventional approach worked here at some level? at least we're talking about negotiating and not about whose button is bigger. >> well, let us be optimistic. there is some non-zero possibility that this kind of shake things up approach would be some kind of progress on what barack obama described to donald