The recent stunning revelation this that CIA Director (and the likely next Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo met with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un over Easter weekend is a stark testament that the sudden springtime thaw on the Korean peninsula is melting faster than any of the players might have conceivably expected. Indeed, if one were to give a President Trump tweet any credence (hard to do under most circumstances), the “Meeting went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed…Denuclearization will be a great thing for World, but also for North Korea!”
Then came further startling news this weekend that Kim Jong-un has suspended missile testing and made noises about shutting down a nuclear facility, prompting a “"This is very good news for North Korea and the World - big progress!” tweet.
Most national security experts and media pundits have criticized Trump’s seemingly impulsive decision to meet face-to-face with the North Korean leader at the very beginning, rather than the end, of what is likely to be a long diplomatic road, and are predicting that the session will neither be successful nor yield anything substantive. After all, they dismiss with thinly-veiled derision, isn’t one of the key participants a brutish thug with a propensity for obfuscation and self-glorification virtually unprecedented for the office he holds? And they’re not referring to Kim Jong-un.
As a 2016 presidential candidate, Donald Trump expressed unrestrained support for views like reinstating military torture, bombing the wives and children of enemy combatants, and mass murdering Muslim prisoners of war with bullets dipped in pig’s blood. As President of the United States, he has been perceived as both encouraging and praising police brutality, closed America’s border to Syrian refugees, obliquely defended white supremacists, demonized Central American immigrants, threatened thermonuclear war over Twitter rages on the size of one’s “button,” and endorsed extrajudicial assassinations of suspected drug users as a public health policy.
And still, Trump’s aides believe he just might manage to win a Nobel Peace Prize. It’s less incongruous or implausible than it sounds.
At this juncture you may either have trouble picturing Donald Trump as a historic peacemaker or questioning whether this writer has embarked upon happy hour a tad too early in the day. But keep in mind one salient fact: while many doubt his temperament and many of the associated self-promulgated myths he has built around himself throughout his reality-tv career. Donald Trump does not. As the president contemplates his upcoming summit with the man he so recently and memorably disparaged as “Rocket man,” he feels confident that his unique deal-making skills will allow him to resolve the tensions that have kept the Korean peninsula in an icy cold war grip for 65 years -- and led Pyongyang to cling to a nuclear arsenal at immense economic and diplomatic cost.
President Trump views the North Korean crisis as his “great man” of history moment. While reaching for the salt and pepper with which I will season my hat prior to taking a bite, here’s how things might unfold.
1.The Playing Field
In the miasma of tweets, fake news, real news and images, it is all too easy to lose sight of the contours of the fundamental challenge the U.S. faces in his North Asia policy. The ugly, inconvenient question most critics ignore or do not address is: from this point in the Hermit Kingdom’s Kubrick-like nuclear odyssey, what are the remaining feasible alternatives? For North Korea in 2018 there are only three realistic outcomes. First, Kim could complete additional ICBM tests that enable Pyongyang to credibly threaten American cities with nuclear strikes. Second, Trump could attack North Korea to prevent outcome No. 1. Or there could be a “third option.”
Cue the Trumpian moment.
At this point in time, Messrs Trump and Kim have opened the door to the third possibility. Down that rabbit hole it is already possible to see the outlines of an agreement that would allow both men to declare victory to the audience they care about most -- the domestic viewer. And this solution has the potential to also give South Korea’s Moon Jae-in, China’s Xi Jinping, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin ancillary victories of their own. Sensing this potential, and knowing how unpredictable (understatement!) both Trump and Kim can be, each leader is scrambling to demonstrate that he is not left out of what could be declared a historic agreement. In this context, Kim’s recent visit to Beijing, which caught many observers by surprise, was actually quite predictable – Ki had never really thought Trump would actually accept the face-to-face invitation and so had likely made it without running it past his closest (and only) ally. China, for its part, after the recent Nuremberg rally-like communist party meeting at which Xi essentially placed the crown of state on his own head, doesn’t want to be cut out. And with Moon already scheduled to meet Kim soon, watch Abe’s and Putin’s moves in the weeks ahead. Should the Trump-Kim summit lead to a concrete agreement, Trump -- who famously promised “too much winning” during his campaign -- could actually boast of an artful deal.
2. Only Nixon Could Go to China
Trump came into office initially thinking he could be the seminal deal maker to bring peace to the Middle East. Ever since his bold attempted shuffling of the deck in recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital (thus ruining what little chance son-in-law Jared Kushner had to get all sides even agreeing to speak with each other), Trump’s stopped talking about that. That initiative is likely deader than the proverbial expired horse. But, ever-searching for validation, effusive praise and the means by which to write his name even larger into the history books, justifying the self-belief that he and he alone -- can overcome the seemingly intractable disaster on the Korean Peninsula. A source who has discussed North Korea with Trump: “He thinks, ‘Just get me in the room with the guy [Kim Jong-un] and I’ll figure it out.’”
Speaking ahead of his own summit with Kim next week, South Korean president Moon Jae-in announced that North Korea had expressed “a will for a complete denuclearization” of the peninsula -- and would not demand the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from South Korea in exchange, something long thought a necessary quid pro quo.
“They have not attached any conditions that the U.S. cannot accept, such as the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea,” Moon went to reporters. “All they are expressing is the end of hostile policies against North Korea, followed by a guarantee of security.” But one should probably treat this promise with at least as much scepticism as Donald Trump’s “great man” theory of (his own role in) history. Historically, Pyongyang has defined “complete denuclearization” as an agreement in which it forfeits its nuclear ambitions in exchange for the dismantlement of America’s security infrastructure in the region. Which is to say: the withdrawal of U.S. troops in South Korea, a cessation of joint military exercises between Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo, and an end to America’s protective nuclear security umbrella over the South.
It is also possible that Kim has decided he could live with a few American troops in the South (there are currently only 23,000 from all armed services), so long as the U.S. pares back all other features of its security policy in East Asia. But there is little material chance that all Kim desires is “an end of hostile policies towards North Korea,” as Washington would define them. And even if Kim were inclined to take a radically softer stance than his father and grandfather, China would be sure to play its current passive-aggressive role as pious advocate of globalisation on one hand, playground bully in the South China Sea and not-so-subtle loan shark and caller-in-of-debts on the other to stiffen his spine. Forcing the U.S. to pare back its security presence in East Asia is as much of a foreign policy prerogative for Beijing as it is for Pyongyang. And Kim’s not-so-subtle visit with Xi Jinping last month was not only a kiss-the-ring of Don Corleone moment but also confirmed that China will have a phantom seat at Trump and Kim’s negotiating table.
Furthermore, Trump knows very little about the region or its history (nor is he intellectually curious enough to seem to care), and tacitly confessed this week that he only recently learned that the Korean War had technically never ended. And sure, while his famous “deal-making” abilities might be a wholly fictional marketing ploy, his steadfast refusal to educate himself on geopolitics, and irascible personality might have soured his diplomatic relationship with a wide variety of U.S. allies, his word might be less trustworthy than just about any major leader’s in world history, and he may very well be cognitively incapable of imagining the world from another person’s perspective, or feeling conventional human empathy.
But yet when it comes to forging a peace deal with North Korea, the president’s aversion to sweating the “small stuff” details of geopolitics could be an asset in a way Barack Obama’s encyclopaedic, wonkish love policy’s minutiae occasionally precluded rapid action. And his disagreeable (and/or sociopathic) personality could prove less detrimental to negotiations than his egotism and susceptibility to flattery are beneficial to them. In fact, those latter qualities are the very reason that peace talks between Trump and Kim are even taking place at all: When the president was presented with North Korea’s routine offer of direct talks, he interpreted it as an unprecedented gesture of conciliation inspired by his exceptional leadership — and then pounced on the opportunity to generate a flattering headline, before his advisers could brief him on the potential downsides of such a summit.
3. The Art of the Deal
What would such a deal look like? In essence, Trump and Kim would announce they had agreed to a framework to verifiably denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, establish a “gentleman’s agreement” in which the parties vow to respect each other’s sovereignty and security, and move toward normalization of relations and a peace treaty ending the Korean War.
Trump and Kim would instruct their personal envoys and negotiation teams to begin immediately working out the specific actions each would take to realize these objectives. They would agree that while negotiations are ongoing, North Korea will continue its moratorium on further missile and nuclear tests, and the U.S. will not further tighten sanctions. They would announce that progress toward the ultimate objectives would advance step by step, verifiable action for verifiable action. And to ensure that the interests of the other four nations are considered, the bilateral negotiators would be embedded in a larger six-party negotiating process similar to the so-called P5+1 negotiations that stopped Iran’s nuclear advance and which, ironically, Trump so vilifies.
Furthermore, if Kim wants to make a big impression on Trump, he could offer, as a visible down payment, to eliminate one or even a small number of nuclear weapons. And Trump could agree that while the “maximum pressure” sanctions remain in place, an exception could be made for South Korea as the nation most proximate to the North, to provide humanitarian assistance.
In the course of negotiations, if a feasible way can be found for North Korea to verifiably freeze fissile material production and further reduce its existing stockpile, the U.S. and South Korea would offer additional sanctions relief and economic assistance. The U.S. would reiterate its long-held fig-leaf position that U.S. forces are present in Korea only at the invitation of the South Korean government and that if some future government of a confederal or unified Korea asked the U.S. to withdraw completely, it would do so expeditiously.
4. Lipstick on a Pig
For Kim, the mere fact that the president of the United States has accepted his invitation for a one-on-one meeting has elevated him to a world-class player and the diplomatic equivalent of Kim/Kanye-level celebrity. Prior to this surge of diplomacy, he had already declared “mission accomplished” (pun intended) in establishing North Korea as a nuclear weapons state, so he can extend the testing freeze indefinitely without significant objections. (After last November’s successful ICBM tests, Kim declared that North Korea had “realized the great historic cause of completing the state nuclear force.”) And even if he gets only modest official relief from the onerous sanctions, he knows that enforcement of sanctions will invariably erode in the afterglow of the deal as the western world’s attention moves to the next Big Issue (such as a Bob Mueller indictment of the president for obstruction of justice).
For Trump, this deal would allow him to claim that he has fulfilled another campaign promise: he pledged to stop Kim from acquiring the capability to attack the United States with a nuclear-armed missile (while he may have implied that this would be done through force a good salesman always leaves himself wriggle room for reinterpretation). Without further full-range ICBM launches to test the performance of the re-entry vehicle, Kim cannot definitively demonstrate the ability to hit the U.S. homeland with a nuclear warhead. Thus, as long as a deal prevents North Korea from conducting further ICBM tests, Trump will be able to claim that he stopped Kim short of America’s goal line -- despite the fact that his predecessors failed to stop the Kim regime from marching down the field into the U.S. red zone. As one of the most skilled marketers in American political history, Trump could sell this as a huge win.
More critically, unlike any previous U.S. president, Trump can plausibly brand a withdrawal of the U.S. military from East Asia as a foreign policy “win” in its own right. After all, the mogul has repeatedly complained about the fiscal costs of maintaining American security guarantees, while calling on U.S. allies to shoulder more of the burden of their own defense. And while his administration’s actual foreign policy has been anything but noninterventionist, his affinity for isolationist rhetoric and gestures has not gone away. Just a few weeks ago, the man was calling on his generals to withdraw all U.S. troops and humanitarian aid from Syria.
For Moon, the benefits of a deal are obvious: it prevents the U.S. from, however inadvertently, starting a war against North Korea that would likely result in retaliation against Seoul, killing hundreds of thousands of South Koreans. He can also rightfully take credit for the shrewd diplomatic manoeuvring that led to this historic summit: inviting North Korea to the Olympics, sending a special envoy to Pyongyang, securing a commitment from Kim to meet, and artfully giving Trump credit for the pressure campaign that created conditions that brought Kim to the negotiating table. A successful summit would also be a huge political victory for Moon ahead of South Korea’s June 13 local elections, in which he hopes to bury the conservative opposition party in order to pursue an ambitious domestic agenda that would seal his reputation as South Korea’s next great president.
Japan’s Shinzo Abe will worry that this deal leaves North Korea with its current ability to conduct nuclear strikes against his country. But he knows that an American attack on North Korea could provoke North Korean retaliation against Japan, including likely incurring nuclear strikes. So, he will welcome anything that averts a second Korean War. Moreover, after multiple North Korean missiles flew over Japan last year, to which Japan responded with nothing but verbal condemnation, Abe will have been spared further provocations from Kim that make him look weak. Besides, he needs to be seen as being on a “winning” side given the miasma of political scandals that have caused a precipitous fall in what were once his almost unassailable poll ratings.
What about Xi? Until recently, China had found itself side-lined in the recent wave of diplomacy. But by persuading Kim to come to Beijing for his first international trip as North Korean leader, Xi has shown that he is a player. To fellow citizens, he is presenting himself as the responsible adult who is leading both the inexperienced (and warmongering) Trump and the young, fresh-faced Kim to make reasonable concessions that avoid war. Ultimately, Xi’s paramount concern on the Korean Peninsula is sufficient stability for China to pursue its bold domestic agenda. The combination of Kim’s antics and Trump’s threats have brought the peninsula closer to war than at any point since 1953, so if they do reach a deal that reduces the risk of war on China’s doorstep, Xi will have met his basic requirement.
The one leader who has been conspicuously quiet over the last month is Putin, especially as he’s smarting from the West calling his bluff to shoot down their missiles in Syria (the Russian military is a paper tiger). But don’t expect him to stay on the side-lines. He will seek to capitalize on the prospect of any deal to assert himself as a global power broker. Look for Putin to invite Kim for a tête-à-tête, perhaps in Vladivostok, sometime in the next several weeks.
5.The Way Ahead
If a deal along these lines somehow emerges from the Trump-Kim summit, it does not require a crystal ball to forecast that it will be attacked by American critics on every side. Some will object that now is not the time to let up on the maximum pressure campaign that is finally starting to squeeze Kim. But we should remember what sanctions were designed to do in the first place: force the North Korean dictator to come to the table and make concessions. Exerting pressure is not a strategy in itself, and it is not without costs. As Kim becomes more financially desperate, he grows more likely to sell whatever he has to the highest bidder, which includes a cast of antagonists even more ruthless and without morals than he. Aside from a direct attack on the U.S. or its allies, the greatest threat posed by a nuclear-armed North Korea is that a regime long-known as “Missiles R’ Us” also becomes “Nukes R’ Us” and sells a bomb to a rogue state or terrorist group that will actually be inclined to use it. So perversely, the tighter the U.S.-led international sanctions squeeze North Korea, the greater the incentives for the cash-strapped regime to turn to the nuclear black market.
Others will object that this deal does not fully “solve” North Korea, as Trump had earlier promised, since it will allow that hitherto renegade regime to maintain its nuclear weapons for the foreseeable future. While that is indeed correct, statecraft has historically requires leaders to choose the least ugly option. At this point, the only other alternative to seeing North Korea acquire a credible nuclear threat to the U.S. homeland is an attack on North Korea that would likely trigger a catastrophic war. By reaching a framework agreement with Kim, Trump will have started down a third path -- at least for now. While the scepticism of most experts about the chances of this achieving a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula is warranted, this may well be the best of all possible worlds.