Trump snookered
IT LOOKS like President Donald Trump was hoodwinked in Singapore. Trump made a huge concession – the suspension of military exercises with South Korea. That’s on top of the broader concession of the summit itself, and security guarantees he gave North Korea, among others.
Within North Korea, the “very special bond” Trump claimed to have formed with Kim Jong-un will be portrayed this way: Kim forced Trump, through his nuclear and missile tests, to accept North Korea as a nuclear equal, to provide security guarantees and to cancel war games with South Korea that the North has protested for decades.
In exchange Trump seems to have won astonishingly little. In a statement, Kim merely “reaffirmed” the same commitment to denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula that North Korea has repeatedly made since 1992.
“They were willing to de-nuke,” Trump crowed at a news conference after meeting Kim. Trump seemed to believe he had achieved a remarkable agreement, but the concessions were all his own.
The most remarkable aspect of the statement was what it didn’t contain. There was nothing about North Korea freezing plutonium and uranium programmes, nothing about destroying intercontinental ballistic missiles, not even any clear pledge to halt testing of nuclear weapons or long-range missiles.
Kim seems to have completely out-negotiated Trump, who doesn’t seem to realise this. For now Trump has much less to show than past negotiators who hammered out deals with North Korea. Trump made a big deal about recovering the remains of American soldiers from the Korean War, but this is nothing new. Trump claimed an “excellent relationship” with Kim. He praised Kim and even adopted North Korean positions as his own, saying the US military exercises in the region are “provocative”.
That’s standard North Korean propaganda. Likewise, Trump acknowledged that human rights in North Korea constituted a “rough situation” but quickly added that “it’s rough in a lot of places, by the way”. Fundamentally, Trump has abandoned bellicose rhetoric and instead embraced the long-standing Democratic position – engage North Korea, even if the result isn’t immediate disarmament.
All of this is to say that Kim proved the more able negotiator. Whatever our politics, we should all want Trump to succeed in reducing tension on the Korean Peninsula, and it’s good to see that he now supports engagement rather than military options. There will be further negotiations, and these may actually freeze plutonium production and destroy missiles. But at least in the first round, Trump seems to have been snookered.