U.S. scrambles to prep for North Korea talks
Basic questions not answered with only 2½ months to go.
Even under WASHINGTON — the best of circumstances, President Donald Trump’s planned summit with North Korea’s leader would be a daunting challenge a faceoff — with the dictator of a pariah state about whom there is little reliable intelligence and whose regime has a history of breaking promises and violating agreements.
But for the Trump administration, that might be the least of its worries. In the breakneck rush to prepare Trump for his meeting with Kim Jong Un in May, the White House is overseeing a frantic scramble to resolve even the most fundamental questions on the U.S. side: Where will the summit be? Who will be at the table? What should be on the agenda?
They have about 2½ months to figure it out — a rapid timetable, especially given the tumult roiling the White House. Since shocking the world — and his staff — by agreeing to meet with Kim, Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. He has also decided to dump national security adviser H.R. McMaster when he finds the right replacement.
Trump administration officials said it is full steam ahead, with high-level meetings between U.S., South Korean and Japanese officials taking place in Washington and California on Friday.
At the White House, Trump spoke by phone with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has his own summit with Kim in Pyongyang in April. Trump reiterated his intention to meet with Kim in May, despite suggestions from some analysts that he delay the meeting and take more time to prepare.
In a private event with campaign donors last week, Trump boasted that he was willing to take risks that his predecessors — George W. Bush and Barack Obama — were not.
“Nobody would have done what I did,” Trump said, calling their strategy “appeasement.” He noted that critics were doubtful of his ability to negotiate but countered: “Maybe we should send in the people that have been playing games and didn’t know what the hell they’ve been doing for 25 years.”
Foreign policy experts warned that the Trump administration needs to be fully engaged, with the president making the summit his top priority, if the White House has any reasonable expectation of success.
But even trying to define what success would look like is difficult, they said, because virtually no one believes that Kim is willing to give up his nuclear weapons and it is unclear what Trump is willing to put on the table to persuade him.
“A normal administration wouldn’t do this,” said Michael J. Green, who served as senior Asia director at the National Security Council (NSC) in the Bush administration.
“The North Koreans have wanted an American president to meet the Kim family since the end of the Cold War to demonstrate to the world their nuclear program got the American president to treat them as an equal. No normal NSC or White House could see how this could be done without damaging the credibility of the president and our alliances.”
President Ronald Reagan held a high-stakes nuclear summit with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Geneva in 1985, but there is no historical precedent for what Trump is attempting, experts said. Washington has no known channels of direct communication with Pyongyang so the two sides are essentially starting from scratch, with Seoul acting as the intermediary. Kim has not publicly confirmed the summit with Trump.
Foreign policy experts emphasized that it would be a mistake to look to past summits for clues as to how the Trump team will prepare. Typically such meetings take many months, even years, to arrange, with lower-level diplomats working out the agenda and what the likely outcomes will be.
For example, when President Barack Obama made a historic trip to Cuba to meet Raúl Castro in 2016, his administration had already reestablished diplomatic relations, opened an embassy in Havana and lifted some economic sanctions.
Trump is essentially approaching his summit with Kim in the reverse order.
“I do not see this as the end game,” said Dan Blumenthal, a former Pentagon official in the Bush administration. “We need to come up with a model of the kind of relationship we’re going to have with North Korea.”