Trump says he will not speak with N. Korea

Experts: President is correct that talks have been unproductive

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump vowed Wednesday that he would not talk to Kim Jong Un, cooling off what has become his on-again, off-again cultivation of North Korea’s rogue dictator.

But if Trump’s tweet, in which he said, “talking is not the answer!,” seemed to reignite tensions with North Korea, it also revealed a paradox in how Asia experts view the crisis. Some fear less that Trump is going to start a war with Kim than that he is going to stumble into a risky, unpredictable dialogue with him.

The world’s attention has understandably focused on Trump’s saber-rattling threats against Kim — most dramatically, his promise to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea if Kim fired ballistic missiles at U.S. territory.

But a meeting between Trump and Kim, these experts said, could open the door to ratifying North Korea’s nuclear status or scaling back America’s joint military exercises with South Korea. That could sunder U.S. alliances with Japan and South Korea and play to the benefit of China, which has long advocated direct dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang.

“What the North Koreans are angling for is to bring the danger and tension to a crescendo, and then to pivot to a peace proposal,” said Daniel R. Russel, who served until March as the assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs. “All of this is focused on pressuring the U.S. to enter direct talks with Kim on his terms. That is the big trap.”

While the Pentagon has drawn up options for a military strike on the North, officials concede it would be all but impossible, given the retaliation it would provoke and the calamitous casualties that would result. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, reflected that internal consensus when he told The American Prospect, “There’s no military solution. Forget it.”

That leaves diplomacy, which Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and other officials have made clear is still the administration’s preferred course. If North Korea curbs its behavior, Tillerson said recently, there is a “pathway to sometime in the early future having some dialogue.”

For now, a Trump-Kim summit remains a far-fetched notion. Even if North Korea was interested in speaking to the United States, its string of belligerent actions — not to mention the June death of OttoWarmbier, the Ohio college student held for nearly 18 months in Pyongyang — would make a meeting politically untenable for Trump.

In his tweet, the president declared, “The U.S. has been talking to North Korea, and paying them extortion money, for 25 years.” While Trump’s precise meaning was unclear, he seemed to be referring to the promises of fuel oil, nuclear power reactors, humanitarian aid and the lifting of sanctions that accompanied previous diplomatic negotiations.

Trump, experts said, is correct that talks with North Korea — whether conducted by Democratic or Republican administrations — have been costly and unproductive. And with the North Koreans now capable, by some estimates, of producing an atomic bomb every sixth or seventh week, the cost of reaching any new agreement would be even higher.

“We’re long past the point where we can fob them off with a few light-water reactors,” said Michael Auslin, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, who argued in an essay in Politico magazine this week that Trump should shun negotiations in favor of a policy of explicitly deterring and containing a nuclear North Korea.

Other experts said it was not diplomacy itself that was problematic — particularly if the United States negotiated, along with its allies and China — but that Trump, acting alone, could be an unpredictable negotiator.

Some experts said they took comfort from the fact that in any summit meeting, the North Koreans would never allow the Americans to determine either the setting or the terms of the negotiation. For a dealmaker and showman like Trump, that would probably be unacceptable.