For Kim Talks, Trump Is in a Bind

WASHINGTON — The Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, drastically different but often spoken of in the same breath, are now being thrust together, as President Donald J. Trump’s determination to kill the landmark 2015 accord limiting Tehran’s capabilities is colliding with his scramble to reach a more complex deal with Pyongyang.

For years, as the Iranians watched the North Koreans build an arsenal and make deals with the West only to break them, they learned what the world was prepared to do to stop them. More recently, the North Koreans picked apart what Tehran got in return for agreeing to a 15-year hiatus in its nuclear ambitions, weighing whether the promised benefits were worth giving up its nuclear capabilities.

The North will be watching closely in May, when Mr. Trump will face a deadline on deciding whether to abandon the Iran deal. The same month, if all goes as Mr. Trump plans, he will head into a negotiation with North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un — the first time an American president has spoken with the leader of that country — to do what his predecessors could not: persuade the North Koreans to denuclearize.

“The ironies abound,” said Robert S. Litwak, the director of international security studies at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. “The man who wrote ‘The Art of the Deal’ has staked out a position that the Iran deal was the worst one in history. And now he has to show that he can do much better, with a far harder case.”

On March 11, two days before he would be named as Rex Tillerson’s replacement as secretary of state, the C.I. A. director, Mike Pompeo, acknowledged on television that Mr. Trump, given his disparagement of the Iran deal reached by the Obama administration, will have to get a better deal out of Mr. Kim. “I think that’s the case,” he said, adding that he thought Mr. Trump would be ne- gotiating from a greater position of strength.

That is debatable. Mr. Kim has driven the pace of this diplomatic effort so far. And if Mr. Trump pulls out of the Iran deal, Mr. Kim may wonder why he should negotiate if a subsequent president can simply pull out of any agreement.

By statute, Mr. Trump must decide by May 12 whether to exit the Iran deal. American officials have said Mr. Trump could pull back if allies agree to unilaterally crack down on Iran’s missile development — which is not covered by the nuclear deal — and begin a process to make the limits on Iran’s ability to produce nuclear material permanent. The British and the French are reluctantly going along. German officials are balking, saying that extending the deal would require new negotiations.

Yet if Mr. Trump sticks with the agreement, he faces a different challenge. Pyongyang, unlike Tehran, actually possesses nuclear weapons. North Korea produces both plutonium and uranium. Iran gave up about 97 percent of its stockpile of low- enriched uranium that the world feared it would use to build a bomb.

Even with a rigorous inspection regime, it will be hard to assure that the North Korean program is really dead. Faced with similar suspicions, Iran agreed to let inspectors roam the country. Before inspectors were thrown out of North Korea, they were limited to one site. When a 1994 agreement during the Clinton administration barred the country from one pathway to the bomb, it learned another.

Mr. Trump’s two major complaints about the Iran deal are that it is not permanent and that it is not broad enough — it does not deal with Iran’s weapons shipments to Hezbollah, its support of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, or its human rights abuses. Matching those requirements in a North Korea deal would make it all the harder to reach.

Mr. Litwak said, “no one has yet said what the scope of a deal would be, but if you look at the Iran deal critique, presumably it would have to solve a lot more than just our nuclear problems.” That could include stopping the North’s chemical weapon, nuclear and missile exports. It might also include eliminating the conventional artillery weapons along the demilitarized zone. The North Koreans are bound to demand that the United States withdraw American troops from South Korea, and perhaps that it agree to a peace treaty and an end to economic sanctions.

“If the president gets the North Koreans just to stop what they are doing, and perhaps get a timetable for future action, that would be a huge step in slowing the North Koreans’ program,” said Christopher Hill, who negotiated the last major deal that the United States had with North Korea, under the George W. Bush administration. “But it still wouldn’t be close to what Iran agreed to do.”