Trump tries to reassure Kim
Experts say President runs the risk of sowing more seeds of confusion
President Donald Trump has reassured North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that he will remain in power under a nuclear deal with the United States, emphasising that his Administration is not seeking regime change amid threats from Pyongyang to cancel a historic summit next month.
In impromptu remarks at the White House, Trump sharply contradicted national security adviser John Bolton, who had said the Administration would ask North Korea to emulate the “Libya model” from 2003 in which the Muammar Gaddafi regime fully relinquished its nascent nuclear weapons programme.
A top Kim aide blasted Bolton this week, blaming the Libya deal for Gaddafi’s eventual downfall in an internationally backed popular uprising in 2011.
“The Libya model isn’t the model that we have at all when we’re thinking of North Korea,” Trump said. “In Libya, we decimated that country.”
By contrast, Trump added, a deal with North Korea “would be with Kim Jong Un, something where he’d be there, he’d be in his country, he’d be running his country, his country would be very rich, his country would be very industrious”.
Trump’s predecessors, including presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, also maintained North Korea policies that did not call for regime change.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has met with Kim twice in Pyongyang over the past two months, has reportedly told him directly that the United States is not seeking his removal from power.
But Trump’s remarks represented a remarkable public guarantee aimed at trying to assuage the North Koreans and ensure they would not back out of the summit, which is scheduled for June 12 in Singapore.
“If we make a deal, I believe Kim Jong Un would be very, very happy,” Trump said.
Trump and his aides have continued to insist that the Kim regime must agree to give up its nuclear programme as part of any deal. But the Administration has not specified a timetable or what the US is willing to offer in return. Kim is said to be pursuing an easing of international economic sanctions, as well as other potential benefits, such as a peace treaty with the US to formally end the Korean War and a reduction of US troops in South Korea.
But some nuclear security experts said Trump undermined his goal of reassuring Kim by appearing to confuse Bolton’s meaning about Libya and, in doing so, issuing a veiled threat to Pyongyang.
Bolton said in recent weeks that the Libya model would require North Korea to fully abandon its nuclear programme before the US would offer reciprocal benefits as occurred in the 2003 deal.
But Trump seemed focused on the overthrow of Gaddafi years later, an outcome that has led to a power vacuum and widespread chaos in Libya. Near the end of his remarks, which came in the Oval Office as he sat next to Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Trump suggested Bolton meant that the fracturing of Libya after 2011 was what would happen to North Korea if Kim does not strike a deal.
“The best thing he could do is to make a deal,” Trump said of Kim. The Libya model “is what will take place if we don’t make a deal”. Kingston Reif, an expert on disarmament at the Arms Control Association, predicted that Trump’s remarks would be interpreted as a threat in Pyongyang and used by hardliners in the Kim regime as evidence that it must not take steps to reduce its arsenal.
“It runs the risk of reinforcing North Korea’s belief that it needs to hang onto nuclear weapons to seek to prevent that kind of outcome,” Reif said, referring to Gaddafi’s overthrow.
“It was incredibly reckless and dangerous. North Korea will absolutely take note of it. I think it does put the summit at risk.”
Bolton, who served in the State Department and as United Nations ambassador in the Bush Administration, replaced Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster in April. Before taking the job, Bolton made the legal case for a first strike military option against North Korea in a newspaper column, and he expressed deep scepticism about diplomatic talks with Pyongyang because the Kim regime has broken promises in the past.
In his statement on Wednesday, Kim Gye Gwan, North Korea’s first Vice-Foreign Minister, said of Bolton: “We do not hide our feeling of repugnance towards him.”
Michael Green, who served as senior Asia director at the National Security Council in the Bush Administration, said: “When you’re openly disagreeing with your national security adviser on the objectives of a major negotiation, that’s going to confuse our friends and allies and maybe embolden the North Koreans.”
Green said Bolton’s suggestion of a quick handoff akin to Libya’s approach is unrealistic because North Korea’s nuclear programme is far more massive. But he said Bolton was “trying to lay down some markers for verifiable denuclearisation”.