Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
N. Korea summit carries risk, reward
But Kim already can claim major win over Trump
No matter what else comes of it, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has scored a huge win with President Donald Trump’s agreement to sit down for a face-to-face meeting.
For decades, North Korean officials have angled to meet with a high-level U.S. representative using all measures of persuasion, whining, wheedling and threatening — and even hostage taking.
To secure a meeting with a sitting U.S. president — no less — amounts to success beyond their wildest dreams.
From a propaganda standpoint, getting into the same room with Trump would elevate the 34-yearold Kim, a pariah and terrorist in the eyes of much of the world, to the status of a world leader.
“This has been North Korea’s long-standing objective to get the president of the United States to come,” said Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA analyst now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They just got lucky with Trump. They have been monitoring him very closely. They saw him as a window of opportunity with a personality that likes to grab attention.”
Proud and isolated, jealous of its capitalist cousin, South Korea, North Korea has long yearned to be treated as a great power.
Its nuclear program has been motivated not only by a desire to protect their system of government but by their hunger for respect on the world stage, analysts say.
Trump’s agreement, announced Thursday, to sit down with Kim is being compared by some observers to President Richard Nixon’s meeting with China’s Mao Zedong in 1972, which is flattering to North Korea.
“The North Koreans have always been waiting for the United States to treat them like China. The U.S. decision to improve relations with China showed China’s centrality,” said Scott Snyder of the Council on Foreign Relations. “They want to matter strategically.”
The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice, not a treaty, and the U.S. has never had formal diplomatic relations with the Communist country.
No sitting U.S. president has met with a North Korean leader. But it was an ex-president, Jimmy Carter, who negotiated a 1994 pact known as the Agreed Framework to provide energy assistance for North Korea in return for gradual denuclearization.
In October 2000, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright traveled to Pyongyang to meet with Kim Jong Il, father of the current leader. The expectation was that her meeting would pave the way for a trip by President Bill Clinton after the November election but before the inauguration of a new president.
The momentum was lost amid the confusion about hanging chads and eventually the presidency of George W. Bush.
Under the Bush administration, the Agreed Framework collapsed. The North Koreans reached out repeatedly to get a meeting with Bush. They failed to get any high-level negotiations going with the U.S. and were frustrated the issue was relegated to sixnation talks led by China.
Although Kim’s invitation to Trump and Trump’s acceptance of the talks without preconditions came as a shock to much of the world, North Korea has been laying the groundwork for Trump from the moment he was elected.
“Kim Jong Un is not some young callow kid. He is a very shrewd character,” said Robert Carlin, a former CIA analyst and negotiator, now a visiting scholar at Stanford University.
With its Fourth of July test of an intercontinental missile capable of reaching the continental U.S. to its powerful hydrogen bomb test in September, North Korea succeeded in getting Washington’s attention.
Then in November, when Kim announced the country had completed the development of its nuclear arsenal, he signaled that he was ready to launch a new phase that included negotiations.
The decision to participate in South Korea’s Winter Olympics co-opted Seoul — a U.S. ally — in the role of an intermediary with its own prestige on the line to make the talks succeed.
As though anticipating a breakthrough, North Korea in 2016 named a seasoned negotiator, Ri Yong Ho, as foreign minister and just two weeks ago promoted another, Choe Son Hui, to a vice ministerial position.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been losing its experienced hands, most notably with the recent retirement of the State Department’s top Korea specialist, Joseph Yun.
To the many North Korean analysts wringing their hands over a potentially catastrophic war, if not a nuclear Armageddon, the talks come as a relief.
But any relief is balanced by the worry that Trump, inexperienced in diplomacy and anxious for a foreign policy win, will be no match for the wily North Koreans.
“I think it is really dangerous,” said John Park, a North Korea specialist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “It is one thing thinking you have a minefield map, and another to sprint through.”
The White House spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, offered a tougher line Friday than she had a day earlier and suggested the summit might not happen.
“We’re not going to have this meeting take place until we see concrete actions that match the words and the rhetoric of North Korea,” Sanders said. “We’ve accepted the invitation to talk based on them following through with concrete actions on the promises that they’ve made.”