POTENTIAL PEACEMAKERS
Why Kim wants to meet Trump
Just by sitting down with U.S. President Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un will get what he craves the most: legitimacy.
He wants to be treated as an equal by the global superpower, and a photo opportunity with the most powerful leader in the free world will go a long way to helping him achieve that.
“This is what his father and his grandfather wanted: to be on the same footing as the world’s greatest power,” said Van Jackson, a former Pentagon official who now teaches at Victoria University in New Zealand. “So I have to grudgingly take my hat off to him because he’s played a very poor hand brilliantly to get there.”
Since inheriting power from his father at the end of 2011, when he was just 27, Kim has been seeking ways to stake his claim to be the rightful heir to the world’s only communist dynasty. He’s played up the notion of having a divine blood-right to the leadership and he’s crowed about how strong North Korea has become under him with all those missiles and nuclear weapons.
Now, within a matter of months, Kim’s propagandists will be able to fill the front pages with news of a meeting between what they will doubtless describe as the two most powerful men in the world.
“Kim wants to portray himself as the bold leader of a normal, peace-loving nuclear power who can meet an American president as equals,” said Duyeon Kim, a senior fellow at the Korean Peninsula Future Forum in Seoul.
Trump on Thursday quickly accepted Kim’s invitation to talks — much more quickly than South Korean President Moon Jae-in, accused in Washington of being too soft on North Korea, accepted his own summit invitation. Preparations are now underway for a meeting between Trump and Kim before the end of May, on the heels of an inter-Korean summit due to be held in the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas at the end of April.
That meeting will be a battle between two mercurial and unorthodox leaders, only one of whom has called the other a “pretty smart cookie.”
“The thing that they have in common is that both of them think that they can outsmart the other,” said Ralph Cossa, president of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum think tank, and a regular interlocutor with North Korean officials. “We’ll have to wait to see who’s right.”
The North Koreans will go into this process with several advantages. For one, they know a lot more about Trump than the United States knows about Kim.
“I’m sure they’ve done their psychological profiles of Donald Trump, just like the CIA has profiled Kim Jong Un,” said Cossa. “The difference is that Kim Jong Un is a much harder nut to crack than Donald Trump, who’s much more transparent. So they’re probably going to have a much better idea of how to play him.”
A second advantage: The Trump administration has few people with experience in dealing with North Korea, while the apparatchiks in the North Korean Foreign Ministry have been working on little else.
Ri Yong Ho, the North Korean foreign minister, was involved in the talks that resulted in the “Agreed Framework” denuclearization deal with the United States in 1994. Choe Son Hui, who was director of the Americas division in the Foreign Ministry until being promoted to vice minister recently, served as an interpreter and close aide to lead negotiator Kim Gye Gwan during the sixparty talks in the 2000s.
“They’ve certainly been around the block a few times since then,” said Robert Gallucci, who was the lead U.S. negotiator for the 1994 agreement. “And we’ve given North Koreans lots of practice in talking to us since then,” he said, referring to rounds of “track 1.5” talks that have taken place in recent years.
KIM JONG UN IS A MUCH HARDER NUT TO CRACK THAN DONALD TRUMP.
The talks, which took place in locations including Mongolia, Norway and Malaysia, have given North Koreans an opportunity to present ideas and test the American response to them, according to participants. But no serving American officials have attended the talks, and in fact, while aware of them, have generally pooh-poohed the idea that they can serve any purpose in the nuclear standoff.
They have, however, served a purpose for the North Korean officials. “They’ve become substantially more sophisticated over the years,” said Gallucci, who last met them in Kuala Lumpur at the end of 2016.
“What Kim Jong Un wants is very clear,” said Ryoo Kihl-jae, a former South Korean minister of unification who now teaches at Ewha Womans University. “In the short-run, sanctions relief is one of his goals.”
But sanctions relief is just a part of his ultimate goal: ensuring the safety of his regime.
“Kim wants the threats from the U.S. to be resolved, and he is ready to engage in ‘give-and-take’ negotiations with neighbouring countries,” Ryoo said.
As for Trump, the talks could be a transformative moment — or a disaster.
If you’re looking for a precedent in Trump’s bellicose foreign policy style, try Richard Nixon, who championed the “madman theory.”
Trump made a reference to it at a dinner last week, when he joked: “I won’t rule out direct talks with Kim Jong Un. As far as the risk of dealing with a madman is concerned, that’s his problem, not mine.”
If you were alarmed by Trump’s tweets that said his nuclear button is “much bigger” than North Korea’s, you were supposed to be.
One half of the madman strategy is theatrical escalation to encourage submission. The other half is unexpected engagement. After spending his entire career bashing Red China, Nixon suddenly announced he would visit it in 1972. The result was a new, creative relationship between Beijing and Washington that is only being challenged today.
Of course, the problem with any high-risk strategy is that it can backfire spectacularly. But if he succeeds, it will vindicate those who voted for him because they wanted him to be a disrupter — a creative novelty.