Blog No. 173 Donald and Kim: Adventures of an Odd Couple

If there is anyone on the planet who was not stunned to hear that Kim Jong Un had suggested a meeting with Trump, and that Trump had immediately accepted the invitation, he or she has not stepped forward to make that claim. Trump and Kim Jong Un are, too put it as gently as possible, the two most idiosyncratic leaders of the world, but they are alike in significant respects. They share in common a taste for belligerent rhetoric, they both have access to nuclear arsenals (though Trump’s is much larger), and both favor an autocratic style (though Kim has much greater freedom to indulge his tastes). As more than one observer has asked ironically, “What could go wrong?”

The announcement of the planned meeting quickly generated a plethora of questions. For example, will the meeting actually happen? Was Trump’s immediate acceptance of the offer a mistake? What are the prospects of a constructive result, short term and long term? What are the risks of failure? The answers to such questions are clearly matters of speculation, even among experts, but that leaves plenty of room for the rest of us to get in the game.

Will the meeting happen?

The initial announcement was made outside the White House by South Korea’s National Security Adviser, and then confirmed by the White House, an odd way of doing things to be sure. The following day, Sara Huckabee Sanders seemed to be on the familiar trail of walking back presidential statements when she said that the North must take “concrete steps” toward denuclearizing in order for the United States to follow through on Trump’s acceptance of Kim’s invitation. No one, however, seemed to have any idea what such concrete steps might be. On the contrary, subsequent statements from administration officials, and from the President himself, appeared to indicate that Trump’s acceptance was unconditional. Still, although the meeting is said to be as early as May, no date or place for the meeting has been agreed upon, and other issues may well arise.

Was acceptance of Kim’s offer a mistake?

Those who have asserted that Trump made a mistake in accepting the offer of a meeting so quickly have focused on one or both of two arguments. First, it is said that Trump gave Kim a prize that his father and grandfather had sought, and received nothing in return. Second, meetings between heads of state ordinarily need to be preceded by lengthy and detailed work by their respective staffs. There is something to both points, but on balance neither is necessarily persuasive.

The “prize” of a meeting with a president of the United States will no doubt give North Korea a measure of prestige and legitimacy that it has long coveted. Those rewards may be undeserved, but it is not clear that by allowing North Korea to enjoy them, the interests of the United States will be harmed. Indeed, our interests may benefit if the recognition has the effect of reducing North Korea’s paranoia (and related susceptibility to ill-considered action). In any case, it is not clear what we could have extracted from North Korea in exchange for the prize of a meeting. Indeed, it appears to be the administration’s position that we have already been compensated by the terms of Kim” s offer.

The CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, put it this way on Face the Nation:

Well this week we’ve gotten more than any previous administration, an agreement to not continue testing nuclear weapons and their missile program the things that would put them capable of getting across the threshold, that’s critical. He’s allowed us to continue our exercises on the peninsula something that’s been fought over for decades. And at the same time he has agreed to have a conversation about need- denuclearization. In the end, Margaret, what will turn out is not about words and what someone says. This administration has its eyes wide open and the whole time this conversation takes place the pressure will continue to mount on North Korea. There is no relief in sight until the president gets the objective that he has set forth consistently during his entire time in office.

Pompeo appears to have overstated the benefits of Kim’s offer (“we’ve gotten more than any previous administration”), as Kim has yet to agree to anything in writing. On the other hand, North Korea has demonstrated in the past that its signature on written agreements is of questionable value, and a pause in the testing of nuclear explosives and of missiles will be verifiable by observation. Moreover, it is doubtful that anything more concrete could have been obtained at this point.

The lack of preparation for a meeting is certainly a valid point and it is underscored both by vacancies in key positions in the State Department and by Trump’s notorious lack of facility in grasping the details and nuances of complex issues. The proposed meeting, however, should be seen as something quite different from other summit meetings—in this case merely a starting point rather than an end point.

What are the prospects of a constructive result?

In the short term, it would be unrealistic to expect the meeting between Kim and Trump to produce a substantive agreement on any of the issues. Rather, it will be a success if the two leaders are able to establish a mutually agreed framework for future negotiations. In the longer term, the prospects of success may depend on how that term is defined. Many of us have been highly skeptical that denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is a realistic goal. Kim, it was argued, was all too aware of the Qaddafi syndrome—that leaders who give up a nuclear capability will live (and die) to regret it. That may still be the case, and Kim may simply be returning to the North Korean playbook of promising to dismantle its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief and economic assistance and then covertly resuming the program. That trap, however, can be avoided if the United States is able to do what Pompeo implied, to maintain sanctions until an iron-clad, verifiable program of denuclearization is in place. In order to make denuclearization  a realistic goal, China’s participation might well vital, as a guarantor of North Korea’s territorial integrity and protection of the regime from outside interference. Apart from that, we have little idea of the price that North Korea would demand in economic aid or other concessions. If the meeting between Kim and Trump goes forward, we may come to have a much better idea. If total denuclearization is not achievable, a settlement based on some lesser degree of constraints should not be ruled out.

What are the risks of failure?

The meeting between Kim and Trump has been described by several observers as a “high risk gamble.” That it may well be, in that the meeting between the two volatile personalities, or even subsequent negotiations, could easily collapse in failure and mutual recriminations. North Korea would then presumably resume testing of nuclear explosives, missiles, or both, and the United States would seek to impose additional sanctions and would resume active consideration of a limited or not so limited military strike against North Korea,

Many experts have argued persuasively that the costs of even a limited military attack against North Korea would be catastrophic and make that option unacceptable. Nevertheless, there have been clear indications that the administration has been seriously considering such an action. For example, the President’s National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster has repeatedly suggested that military action may be necessary to prevent North Korea from having the capacity to launch a nuclear attack against the United States. In December he said that the prospect of war with North Korea is “increasing every day, which means that we are in a race, really, we are in a race to be able to solve this problem.” A recent article in The Atlantic explains in some detail why McMaster believes that “the possibility of military action against North Korea could be understood not as a ‘good thing,’ but as the ‘least bad.’” McMaster does not necessarily reflect a consensus view in the administration, but it is doubtful that he would stray far from the president’s thinking in his public comments.

Also of note, a recent op-ed by John Bolton in The Wall Street Journal argued that “It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current ‘necessity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first.” Bolton was an Ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan administration and is widely regarded as an undiluted war hawk. While he is not in the current administration, Bolton has been rumored as a possible successor to either McMaster or Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and he met with Trump in the Oval Office just last Tuesday, March 6. In the meantime, Congress has maintained a studied indifference to its constitutional duty to declare (or decide not to declare) war.

In short, if negotiations with North Korea should fail, matters may well be dire, but not necessarily more dire than they had already become. The only respect in which the situation might be made worse is if the dialogue with North Korea were to end in a way that Trump found personally humiliating or came at a time when he was beset by one crisis or another. It may be recalled that Trump made his initial tariff announcement with no advance warning to his own staff when he had become “unglued” over various other matters.  One must hope that he does not take any action on North Korea while similarly unglued.