Analysis: Trump betting on personal diplomacy with Kim
SINGAPORE — On paper, there is nothing President Donald Trump extracted from North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, in their summit meeting that Kim’s father and grandfather had not already given to past American presidents.
In fact, he got less, at least for now. But none of that really matters to him.
Instead, Trump is betting everything on the “terrific relationship” and “very special bond” that he said he developed with the 34-yearold dictator, and Trump’s seeming certainty that they now view the future elimination of North Korea’s arsenal of atomic weapons the same way. He swatted away suggestions that the phrase “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” means something different in Pyongyang than it does in Washington.
This entire venture in the steamy summer in Singapore, the beating capitalist heart of Southeast Asia, is based on his conclusion that past presidents got it backward. U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un exit the room Tuesday after a signing ceremony at the Capella resort in Singapore.
So Trump flew halfway around the world to meet the leader of one of the world’s most-repressive nations on the theory that if he could win over the country’s leader with a vision of future wealth, North Korea will determine that it no longer needs its nuclear weapons. Or its missiles, its stockpiles of VX and other nerve agents or its biological weapons.
It is a huge gamble, based on the very Trumpian assumption that the force of his personality, and the
deal-making skills in which he has supreme confidence, will make all the difference.
Trump said he has no doubt that Kim has made a strategic decision to give it all up.
“I think, honestly, I think he’s going to do these things,” Trump insisted. “I may be wrong. I mean, I may stand before you in six months and say, ‘Hey, I was wrong.”’ He paused a moment, realizing how out of character that would be.
“I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that,” he added, “but I’ll find some kind of an excuse.”
But Trump says he spent time studying past negotiations, so he might have discovered that North Korea agreed to hotlines and arms pullbacks with South Korea in 1992. It agreed to halt plutonium production with the Clinton administration in 1994.
In 2005, it committed, with the Bush administration, to “abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs and returning at an early date to the treaty on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons” and to International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. That was far more detailed than anything Kim signed Tuesday.
Yet some have applauded the effort.
“We’re in a better place today than we were a year ago,” Antony Blinken, who was deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama. It was worth trying the top-down approach to dealing with Kim, he went on, because the alternative path has failed repeatedly.
The first test of that theory may come as soon as next week, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is supposed to begin translating the vague set of commitments signed Tuesday into something that resembles a disarmament plan.
Robert Litwak, a Wilson Center scholar, warned that Trump is not walking into the kind of negotiation he thinks he is.
“The upcoming negotiations will be arms control to constrain the North Korean program, not disarmament to eliminate it,” Litwak said.
The supreme irony, as Litwak and others noted Tuesday, is that an effort to constrain the North’s capabilities, rather than eliminate them, has shades of the Iran deal that Trump just rejected.
If Trump allows this negotiation to become about just limiting the North’s capabilities, he will repeat the moves that he castigated Obama for making in Iran. If he insists on getting it all — “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization” — he risks coming up empty-handed.