President finds exit from increasingly risky meeting
WASHINGTON — As recently as Wednesday afternoon, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted that “all across the administration” preparations were steaming along for a historic summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Less than 24 hours later, Trump canceled the meeting, citing the “tremendous anger and open hostility” in statements from Pyongyang.
In the end, former and current government officials said, the cancellation may have saved Trump from a meeting in which the goal he had set appeared increasingly unlikely to be achieved and the risk of being outfoxed by the North Korean leader seemed unacceptably high.
“Although North Korea has made ominous threats that the president had to respond to, I also think the president used these threats to tank a summit that was ill-prepared,” said Wendy Sherman, a former deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration.
With the summit less than three weeks away, the Trump administration and North Korea had not agreed on the meaning of “denuclearization” — the objective Trump had aimed for. Major negotiating points, such as conditions, incentives, a timeline and what kind of phaseout of weapons might take place had not been resolved.
Trump had already given a major concession by agreeing to meet Kim before any of the diplomatic spadework was accomplished. He had also publicly praised the North Korean leader, reversing the harsh rhetoric he used last summer. “The problem has always been that this process is all backwards,” said Robert Manning, a former intelligence analyst now at the Atlantic Council think tank. “Usually a summit comes after both sides have taken certain steps.”
The process had already given Kim several victories, from his perspective.
In domestic propaganda, the agreement to meet, and Trump’s praise, had reinforced his well-crafted image as a powerful and benevolent leader. He gained a large dose of international recognition, a sort of legitimacy that the longisolated country never had, from his two meetings each with Chinese President Xi Jinping and South Korean President Moon Jae-in as well as the invitation to meet with Trump.
Kim would have liked more — the North Koreans want relief from the punishing economic sanctions that the U.S. and other countries have put in place. But recognition on the global stage has long been a paramount goal.
The North Koreans did make a splashy concession of their own — detonating explosives Thursday that they said had destroyed the tunnels at the underground site used for their six nuclear tests. Analysts, however, discounted that, noting that it resembled a similar move in 2008. Experts say that North Korea could rebuild the tunnels in as little as three months.
Even without restarting the tests, Kim can rest on his laurels for now. Until a new summit is scheduled — still a possibility — he doesn’t have to worry about being asked to give up his nuclear arsenal, a demand that most Korea experts believe he never had the intention to comply with.
The whiplash nature of Trump’s foreign policy clearly also was a factor in the return, for now, to a stalemate.
Some analysts said Trump had raised expectations unreasonably high by speaking of immediate “complete denuclearization” and repeatedly mentioning he might win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Others said Kim was playing Trump all along.
“This is part of their campaign to sabotage our maximum pressure campaign,” said Anthony Ruggiero, a former Treasury Department official who specialized in financial sanctions. “Now they’ll say: ‘Hey, we wanted to go to the summit. We even got rid of our nuclear test site. It’s the Americans who canceled.’ ”
The biggest loser in the cancellation is South Korea’s Moon, whose statements indicated that he had been blindsided by the decision to scrap a summit behind which he was the main moving force. South Korea had to call an emergency security meeting in the middle of the night when the Trump letter became public.
“In a contest of who can be the most erratic leader, President Trump beats Kim Jong Un hands-down,” Joel Wit, a former diplomat who supported Trump’s North Korea initiative, said via Twitter. “His unsteady hand has left everyone scratching their heads, including our (South Korean) allies. No one knows where this is going to lead, but it will not be good for the United States.”