Trump should stop bragging and strike a real deal with Kim

US president’s showmanship will flop in Vietnam if North Korea does not commit to an agreement

Upon taking office in January 2017, US President Donald Trump intensified America’s efforts to isolate North Korea. And at first, his administration’s diplomatic and pressure campaign seemed to show real progress, particularly in Africa, where North Korea maintains economic and military ties.

But that progress was suddenly reversed last year, when Trump prematurely declared victory in the aftermath of his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore. On February 27-28, Trump will hold his second summit with Kim. If he repeats the same mistake, his own administration’s efforts to isolate North Korea will take another beating, and Kim will have even less reason to end his weapons programme.

Before the Singapore summit, the Trump administration had been strengthening United Nations sanctions against North Korea, emphasising enforcement, and reaching out to African countries to secure their support. And this combination of US high-level engagement, cajoling, and arm twisting led several African governments – including those of Egypt, Sudan, Uganda, and Angola – to announce that they would scale back their ties to North Korea.

Sadly, what took years to achieve was lost in a single day. In a characteristically grandiose and unsubstantiated tweet, Trump declared on June 13, 2018, that, “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” Though his own vice president and intelligence chiefs would later voice very different conclusions, Trump was committed to selling the fiction of a diplomatic breakthrough, even to the point of stifling US diplomats. As the Wall Street Journal reported this past December, “Many in the Trump administration have been instructed to remain quiet on North Korean defiance over concern that speaking out could undercut the image of an effective sanctions regime or weigh on negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang.”

With the Trump administration focused wholly on propping up a false narrative, African governments with illicit ties to North Korea no longer had to worry about US pressure over sanctions, nor did they have any incentive to follow through on their promises to cut ties. After all, for African countries, North Korea poses no direct security threat, but does offer friendship, cheap arms, and infrastructure investments.

Since Trump started pretending that he has ended the North Korean nuclear threat, African countries have likewise been pretending to end ties with the Kim regime. Though they are being more surreptitious about it, North Korean commandos are still training Ugandan soldiers, and North Korean companies are still flouting sanctions and making money in Africa.

It is not surprising that Trump chose showmanship over substance, or that he scuttled a long-term sanctions-enforcement effort in the process. But the significance of this blunder should not be understated. Trump’s single tweet and ongoing self-delusion about North Korea’s nuclear programme will likely leave the US with fewer options for isolating or confronting the Kim regime long into the future.

For North Korea, the foothold in Africa is of great importance, especially if and as the US convinces China

and Russia to curtail their own illicit support for the Kim regime. According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity at MIT, North Korea’s trade with African countries has provided the regime with hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years. At the same time, a UN Panel of Experts has singled out North Korea’s connections to various African countries as a concerning weak spot in global sanctions enforcement.

Trump has personally undercut years of work to isolate North Korea and deprive it of funding, thereby expanding the Kim regime’s options and reducing pressure

on it to negotiate peaceful disarmament. Unless Trump aligns his claims with reality after the upcoming summit with Kim in Vietnam, he will further weaken the sanctions-enforcement regime needed to choke off the international relationships that enable North Korea to sustain its weapons programmes. Self-proclaimed victories on Twitter don’t count. — Project Syndicate Grant T Harris is CEO of Harris Africa Partners LLC and was Special Assistant to President and Senior Director for African Affairs at the White House from 2011-2015

It is not surprising that Trump chose showmanship over substance, or that he scuttled a long-term sanctions-enforcement effort in the process.