A headache but no surprise
The US-North Korea summit falls victim to bipolar rhetoric.
SERIOUSLY, is anyone really shocked that the much-ballyhooed Summit-of-the-Century between President Trump and North Korean President Kim Jong-un now hangs in the balance?
From the start, this highly unusual meeting of the minds was undertaken in an unorthodox way, to put it mildly. Negotiated often by tweet and news communique rather than through established diplomatic channels, it began with threats and name-calling. Trump sought laughs from his base by dismissing the North Korean leader as “Little Rocket Man”, and Kim responded by calling Trump a “dotard”. When Kim referred to a Trump speech as “reckless remarks by an old lunatic”, Trump asked “Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me ‘old’, when I would NEVER call him short and fat?”
But while the schoolboy insults were bandied to the amusement of the world, there were also real threats of serious violence by players who at least in theory had the power to follow through if they chose to. Trump said ominously that “military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded”. He threatened to unleash “fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before”. In one speech he vowed to “totally destroy North Korea”.
Kim made equally rash threats. “The United States should know that the button for nuclear war is on my table,” he said. “The entire area of the US mainland is within our nuclear strike range.”
Then, suddenly, the mood veered. Out of nowhere there was a summit on the table, and the two irresponsible players were unlikely besties. “There is a good chance that Kim Jong-un will do what is right for his people and for humanity,” tweeted a born-again Trump. He said he believed North Korea would honour its commitment not to conduct a missile test.
This was such a “very special moment for World Peace”, that the US issued an official commemorative coin with a picture on it of Trump and Kim face to face. Three American hostages were released and Trump revelled in the ludicrously premature suggestion that he deserved to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
And then things turned ugly again over the past week, with Trump administration officials talking about North Korea potentially following Libya into ruins and regime change, and a top North Korean diplomat saying, “To borrow their words, we can also make the US taste an appalling tragedy it has neither experienced nor even imagined up to now.”
And here we are.
Veering back and forth between public taunts and flattery – between belligerence and brotherly love – is not the way smart diplomacy is done. Of course there’s an element of carrot and stick in any negotiation, and some posturing is often part of the game as well. But over time, the pursuit of meaningful foreign policy achievements requires substantially more. It requires an understanding of your adversary and your adversary’s interests. It requires the setting of short-term and long-term goals. It requires a clear-eyed assessment of costs and benefits of different options. It requires consistency, stability, authority and a long-term strategy.
Did the Trump administration have a sophisticated plan or a longterm strategy? There was no indication of one.
Most of the media, like Los Angeles Times, vacillated between cautious optimism and rational skepticism about the idea of a meeting between the two hot-headed leaders. Diplomacy, after all, is almost always worth trying – especially when the alternative is military action. But it seemed highly possible that Trump’s great expectations would go unfulfilled.
The collapse of the summit – and the promise of its resurrection just 24 hours later – is hardly a surprise.
As a Bloomberg editorial pointed out, exactly why Trump won’t meet Kim in Singapore on June 12 is unclear. Perhaps he’s come to think that the North Koreans were never sincere about discussing a formula to abandon their nuclear-weapons programme. In any event, Trump’s withdrawal avoids the risk that he might have struck a bad deal in pursuit of a moment’s applause – and that’s all to the good. The door to future negotiations hasn’t closed. North Korea says it wants to keep talking. What matters now is to get this process on to a more productive track.
This will take some doing. Trump’s approach up to now has weakened the US position. If the US had shown it was prepared to negotiate in good faith and the North wasn’t, it would now be in a stronger position. Instead, South Korea’s government may grudgingly agree with the North’s charge that the US is not to be trusted. China will be confirmed in that assessment. Both countries may soon be urging a lifting of sanctions.
The administration should assure its allies and China that it’s still open to serious talks. US diplomats should stay in contact with North Korean counterparts and do the preparatory work that should already have been done. They’ll need to repair the partnership with South Korean officials, reportedly blindsided by Trump’s announcement. The US, not North Korea, must be seen as the party most committed to a peaceful resolution.
The US administration’s nuclear threats aren’t helpful – or all that credible, either. Bluster and bullying on trade and other foreign-policy issues are plainly counterproductive. Maintaining sanctions won’t be easy, and the US needs friends to help. And when it comes to China, linking sanctions enforcement to trade is unwise. Enforcing sanctions is a United Nations obligation: Don’t make that a bargaining chip in a clash over agricultural tariffs.
One thing hasn’t changed. A negotiated settlement offers the only real prospect for peace on the Korean peninsula. Achieving that settlement will probably require the US to accept something less than prompt and complete denuclearisation – but something less than that could nonetheless reduce the North Korean threat to a more manageable level. That’s well worth pursuing, and if it happens would deserve to be celebrated. But to get there, Trump and his advisers will need to change their approach, do their homework, and start measuring their words.