And the hoopla begins
What to watch for when Trump meets Kim for a historic summit in Singapore this Tuesday.
THE Singapore summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un will be the most riveting reality show of the Trump presidency.
It’s not just the optics of two leaders who are consummate showmen with daunting hairdos trying to upstage each other in front of a zillion cameras. And it’s not just the unpredictability – as the secretive but shrewd North Korean faces a US leader who hates briefings and loves to deviate from his script.
This is about real stuff, about whether a North Korea that is a full-blown nuclear power with intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach the United States mainland is really ready to shed its nuclear weapons. And about whether Trump has a realistic strategy or, in the glamour of the moment, will be played by Kim. As we approach the historic moment, here’s what to watch for to help you assess the summit state of play.
The optics matter
Too much Trump bonhomie, hugs, or public flattery will only bolster Kim’s astonishingly swift rise from “little rocket man” to a global leader wooed by Beijing, Moscow, and Seoul, and now sit- ting across from the US president. So watch to see if the summit produces more than another Trump bromance – a “get-to-know-you situation”, as Trump put it. Will a detailed framework and timetable for denuclearisation emerge?
A ‘Big Bang’ or the beginning of a long negotiating process?
Will Trump accept the latter? When the summit talk first started, the White House insisted its goal was the complete, verifiable, and irreversible destruction of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, or CVID. Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, cited the Libyan model, in which Muammar Gaddafi’s minimal programme with no nukes was dismantled in three months.
“CVID is a pipe dream,” says Joel Wit, a former US diplomat involved in past negotiations with North Korea, who is now a senior fellow at the Stimson Centre in Washington. “The issue for us is, how far can we get in that direction? A freeze (of nuclear and missile testing), rolling back, and dismantling is not something that happens overnight.”
Indeed, CVID is a distant, proba-
bly unachievable goal given Pyongyang’s cache of over 60 nukes and its enormous programme.
The president, on a steep learning curve, has started back-pedalling on a big bang and talking about process, and Bolton has been curbed (for now). But a long process would make the negotiations look more like those of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, which
blocked Pyongyang’s nuclear progress for years, but ultimately failed.
“There’s nothing Trump can say at the summit that will convince Kim (to completely end his program) but he could set the tone for serious talks while testing Kim along the way,” says Suzanne DiMaggio, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. But will Trump have the patience for the long haul?
Peace of our time?
There are rumours that there will be some sort of announcement of an end to the war between North and South Korea, attended by South Korean President Moon Jai-in (the 1953 war ended with a UN armistice). This would provide high drama, but would make it much harder for Trump to re-exert any military pressure on North Korea if arms talks went nowhere. This is why previous US presidents have opposed pursuit of a formal North-South peace accord before the nuclear issues are addressed.
Who’s the better deal-maker?
“Kim has proven himself to be a really savvy negotiator,” says DiMaggio. The summit will provide Kim with the recognition he and his father sought in vain from previous US presidents, and Trump has delivered it before any progress on divesting North Korean nukes.
Kim has also used the prospect
of talks to undercut the sanctions regime that helped get him to the table. Beijing is already informally loosening sanctions while Russia has called for their lifting and invited Kim to Moscow.
Meantime, South Korea’s President Moon – the prime mover behind the summit – is moving ahead with peace efforts, with or without Trump.
In other words, Kim is wooing the regional leaders whom Trump will need to exert future leverage on Pyongyang. This administration is focused on bilateral talks but there is no evidence it has the skills and capacity to do multilateral diplomacy.
Many Korea experts also wonder whether Trump might fall prey to Kim’s demands that he reduce troops on the Korean peninsula before denuclearisation, worrying Asian allies that America no longer has their back. “He could get caught up in a moment of personal glory where he could give up the whole store,” muses DiMaggio. “He’s got to be ready to resist his instincts to make a bad deal.”
The reality of Trump’s dealmaking talents will be on full display in Singapore.
And let’s not forget the nightmare of the people
Amid the summit hoopla, it’s worth remembering that North Korea is the world’s worst human rights nightmare. Kim’s capacious cruelty toward his own people cannot be overstated, nor mitigated by his recent diplomatic charm offensive. He is a true totalitarian tyrant.
For North Korea’s 26 million people, Kim’s regime controls every aspect of life: where they reside, the direction of their lives, how much they can eat. From the earliest age, children are indoctrinated in themes of unconditional obedience to “the dear leader” and a duty to criticise (inform on) others.
Telephones are tapped. Mobile phones and computers are blocked from the Internet. All of this is the least of Kim’s crimes, according to investigations by the United Nations – people are persecuted for the religion because Kim views religion as a threat to his cult of personality. Pervasive discrimination against women leaves them vulnerable to trafficking, transactional sex and forced abortions – the latter performed in brutal, excruciating ways in prison.
Worse yet are the public executions, torture and “disappearing” reserved for stamping out any shred of political dissent. Entire families vanish because of association with one accused member. Four political camps with shoot-tokill security hold an estimated 80,000 to 120,000 of these forsaken people who, according to testimony before the UN commission, never go home.
They live lives of unremitting misery and starvation, reduced to eating grass, scavenging for crumbs, and vying for the chance to kill vermin for protein. One woman was beaten for picking through cow dung for undigested grain.
The fountainhead of this misery, Kim, is scheduled to sit down with America’s president this Tuesday. The harsh reality is that, for now, demands for basic human rights have to take a back seat to efforts to negotiate away the dynastic leader’s nuclear weapons.
Even so, this does not mean Trump has to be a smiling, conciliatory pal, ignoring sins for the sake of amity. His embrace of other authoritarian foreign leaders has already produced its share of cringe-worthy moments.
If the world sees a beaming Trump patting and praising Kim, the US president will have pandered to a whole new level of evil.