By Trump’s own yardstick, deal falls way short
SINGAPORE — After all the hype, all the vows to tackle what’s perhaps the world’s most urgent crisis, President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un fell short of the kind of deal the U.S. president himself has long said is needed to settle the North’s decades-long pursuit of nuclear weapons.
For months, Trump has been railing against presidents past, accusing them of an inexcusable failure to solve the nuclear threat emanating from the North. On Tuesday, he patted himself on the back for signing a “comprehensive” pact with Kim paving a path toward denuclearization, but the contours appeared far weaker than even his predecessors’ failed deals.
Rather than a detailed statement filled with concrete restraints on the North, the document seemed to amount mostly to a restatement of long-assumed principles and an agreement to keep talking. And Trump made dramatic on-thespot concessions to Kim that his own advisers had urged him against, including a halt on “provocative” U.S.-South Korea military exercises and an admission he could be willing to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea in the future.
“These are all things that Trump is putting on the table as concessions, all in exchange for some vague promises by the North Koreans,” said Paul Haenle, a former China director at the White House National Security Council in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations.
Haenle called the language in the joint statement “weak, vague and worrisome.”
In the document, signed with great fanfare by Trump and Kim in Singapore, Kim committed to “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” Trump said that process would be starting very soon, adding that once it starts, “it’s pretty much over.”
Not so simple. Kim has made the denuclearization pledge before. In his April agreement with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, the language was similar, with the two vowing to achieve “a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula through complete denuclearization.”
To be sure, the fact the U.S. and North Korea are now on speaking terms, with a prominent display of nascent rapport among their leaders, augurs a lowering of tensions that likely reduces the chances of a nuclear confrontation in the short term.
All this leaves Trump open to criticism that he has given Kim what he has long wanted — recognition, respect and legitimacy on the world stage as an equal — without getting anything substantive on nukes in return.