Summit worth a shot
The Washington Post reports: “A top North Korean official is on his way to United States for talks about a landmark summit between Kim Jong Un and President Trump, as efforts to . . . make the meeting happen go into overdrive . . . .
“Although Trump has not officially announced that the summit, which he abruptly canceled on Thursday, is back on, his staff is acting as though it is. During a television interview in Washington on Tuesday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said that if the summit does not take place on June 12, it could be held shortly afterward.”
Keep in mind that administration surrogates often don’t know what is going on, the president is not a reliable indicator of what his own administration is up to, and South Korea’s optimistic spin on North Korea’s intentions can depart substantially from Pyongyang’s actual position. So no one knows if and when a summit will take place.
Taking a step back, the administration needs to decide what it wants to obtain. If the only acceptable outcome is Pyongyang’s immediate denuclearization, any summit will end in failure. The administration would do well to listen to three former national security officials who urge us to get away from the all-or-nothing Trumpian approach, which devolves into a binary choice between complete denuclearization or war.
Former acting CIA director John McLaughlin says a more achievable goal is possible. He advocates the following:
“Trump and Kim could issue a simple launching statement saying they have charged their diplomats to work closely with the aim of charting a path toward denuclearization. The two leaders would then meet, personally, ideally with Chinese and South Korean participation, at whatever point their professional diplomats managed to achieve sufficient convergence on outstanding issues. Japan, as a close ally threatened by Kim’s weaponry, could also be included—but at minimum must be kept fully informed.
“There is no guarantee that this would work, but to the extent that these capitals can get the focus away from summitry and saber-rattling and toward real talks, a process and concrete objectives, the region and the world will be a safer place.”
Another CIA veteran, former director Michael Hayden, has a similar suggestion: “These folks are not going to get rid of all their nuclear weapons. And if President Trump’s ‘brand,’ and that’s the right word here, going into this meeting demands something like that, this is going to end up in a very bad place,” Hayden said on ABC’s This Week.
He continued, “You have the meeting. Everyone smiles. Everyone shakes hands. And everyone agrees on a work program that they give to their staffs that moves the Korean Peninsula in a direction of being more stable, more transparent, less prone to war. But I don’t think we’re going to have a parade of missiles or weapons going through some destruction site that we can put on camera.”
Former director of national intelligence James Clapper adds his voice to the chorus urging more modest aims. “What I’ve been long an advocate for is let’s first establish the conduit, the apparatus for communicating,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union. “And by that, I mean establishing interest sections in both Washington and Pyongyang. What this means is a diplomatic presence below the level of a full embassy, much as we did in Havana, Cuba, for decades.”
This is not a reward for North Korea’s conduct but rather a means of continuing the discussions and, frankly, gaining more insight into North Korea’s political and economic situation.
However, maybe Trump can be persuaded to take a photo op, declare his superiority to previous presidents in managing the North Korea crisis, and modulate his rhetoric both to calm down our South Korean allies and to pull back from a military confrontation that Congress and the American people fear. It’s worth a shot.