Washington’s PR push may get the peace prize
Late last year, I joined a group of journalists in Korea and Washington for a series of meetings with US and South Korean officials. The Americans pulled out all the stops. There were 12 journalists from countries including Vietnam, Thailand, Mongolia, Burma, China, Singapore, Japan, Indonesia (and New Zealand).
Flights were booked and paid for by the US and we got a generous daily per diem to cover all our other costs, like food and accommodation.
We were in the vanguard apparently. The US government would be flying over many more journalists for similar meetings over the coming months, from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East included, we were told.
It was clear there was a major public relations push on. So none of us expected what happened next.
The stated purpose of the travel was to inform our understanding of America’s policy on the denuclearisation of the North Korean peninsula. But on our arrival in Seoul few were prepared to talk publicly about the policy. Background briefings were held under strict conditions of anonymity – no attribution, no stories quoting ‘‘sources’’.
Oddly, photographs were often allowed. We posed like grinning tourists alongside the officials who held our briefings.
As the week progressed, we journalists got to know each other better while we ate out at traditional Korean restaurants and sampled the local beer. We set up a Facebook group to share ideas and jokes about how we could report our invisible meetings.
And we trailed from one Government building in Seoul to the next, increasingly dispirited by the official silence.
We took a bus to the Demilitarised Zone and gaped over the border at North Korea. We took a detour to Camp Humphrey, the closest military base to North Korea, and the largest US military base anywhere in the world.
We joined American soldiers in the queue for a Subway sandwich and trailed into a private room for another briefing that we weren’t supposed to write about.
Our frustration was at breaking point by then. After some negotiation – and a few anguished complaints – it was agreed reporters might be allowed to use some of the material if the military cleared their copy in advance. Some tried but got most of it knocked back. I didn’t ask. There were too many strings attached.
In Washington, more official doors were opened but under the same strict conditions that they were not for reporting. Unofficial interviews, from the various think tanks for instance, were at least quotable, but of limited use without the official line to back it up.
As the trip progressed it became clear there was no particular reason for the secrecy. No-one was saying anything that differed markedly from what was already out in the public domain.
Having flown us from the other side of the world to talk about North Korea and US President Donald Trump, noone seemed too sure why we were there.
When we queried it, the response was a general instruction to ‘‘just write something’’. (Six somethings to be precise – that was the number of stories we were required to produce).
So why were we there?
It was presumably an indication of how far the narrative had shifted in the 12 months since the first summit between Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un that the US felt it needed to woo the international media.
Trump was the hero of that summit, which took place under the shadow of North Korean belligerence. The other ‘‘hero’’ was Kim, who was given legitimacy by a US president meeting the North Korean leader for the first time as an equal.
But since the Trump-kim love-in at Singapore there has been no meaningful progress toward denuclearisation by North Korea. That has only reinforced the general scepticism that the first summit was mostly smoke and mirrors.
North Korea may have been driven to the negotiating table by its desperate plight after years of punitive economic sanctions, but there is still huge scepticism over how genuine it is about meeting the international community halfway on denuclearisation.
The official line on North Korea is that the international community expects complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation before the sanctions are lifted. (This is the line that the New Zealand and Australian foreign ministers reiterated during their sixmonthly bilateral meeting in Auckland in February).
But despite the lack of substantive progress, and despite Kim’s status as a brutal and murderous leader, there has been push back.
China has relaxed its own trade sanctions against North Korea, undermining the push in Washington, while Russia has been accused of violating UN sanctions, in particular over its reliance on North Korean slave workers.
In Seoul, everyone we spoke to was at pains to stress the US and South Korea were on the same page. But there was a division of opinion over South Korea’s more forward leaning president, Moon Jae-in, whose policy of rapprochement with North Korea was moving too fast for Washington, which wanted action before concessions.
The day I visited the DMZ a South Korean train crossed the heavily militarised frontier into North Korea for the first time in a decade, a hugely symbolic gesture, and one seen by the South Korean’s as a small step toward eventual integration. It also required a raft of UN exemptions because it breached the current sanctions.
Washington’s courting of foreign media was presumably a reaction to the pendulum swing.
There is of course a long history of failed US – indeed failed international – diplomacy with North Korea. That explains much of the sensitivity surrounding our visit.
At the time there was speculation the second Trump-kim summit might be announced within days, hence everyone was walking on diplomatic egg shells. That didn’t happen. A second summit will take place in Vietnam next week.
But there was clearly also wariness about contradicting official White House policy – or more precisely, policy announced via the US President’s twitter feed.
At the time of our visit there seemed to be little consensus on the usefulness of a second Trump-kim summit, given that the North Koreans had so far paid lip service to the goal of denuclearisation.
Indeed, Kim’s warning in a televised speech that North Korea might be ‘‘compelled to explore a new path’’ to defend its sovereignty if the United States ‘‘seeks to force something upon us unilaterally . . . and remains unchanged in its sanctions and pressure’’ suggests a second summit would be precipitate.
Of course, no-one is discounting either that Trump’s erratic and unique brand of diplomacy might work on an equally eccentric leader like Kim.
The first summit may have achieved little concrete in the way of denuclearisation, but it clearly helped defuse tensions on the Korean peninsula.
Trump’s boast that he brought peace to the peninsula is not entirely without merit, though North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is still intact.
But as Australian foreign minister Marise Payne noted after her talks with Peters: ‘‘Anyone who thinks this is easy or going to happen quickly is under a serious misapprehension. It’s a painstaking process, it’s a complex process, it’s a difficult process.’’
Which – without breaching the cone of silence too far – is pretty much what we heard in all those off the record briefings in Seoul and Washington.
But you can understand the reason for such official circumspection when the boss is already talking up the prospect of a Nobel peace prize for achieving peace in our time.
* Tracy Watkins travelled to Washington and Seoul recently with funding from the US government.