Does Trump deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?
We debate whether his role in Korea rapprochement makes him worthy
If Korea negotiations go well, he will have earned it James S. Robbins
A year ago, the prospect of President Trump being considered for a Nobel Peace Prize would have sent critics’ heads spinning. Now, if all goes well in U.S. negotiations with North Korea, Trump should be the odds-on favorite.
Resolving the almost seven-decade division, one of the last major vestiges of the Cold War, would be an epochal international event. South Korea’s former president Kim Dae Jung was awarded the peace prize in 2000 for simply beginning the process of détente with North Korea.
Now, the historic summit between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un alone has the makings of a peace prizeworthy effort, effectively ending a war that had been frozen since the 1950s. But Moon went out of his way to give credit to Trump. “President Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize. All we need is to bring peace,” Moon said.
Trump indeed deserves much of the credit. Trump was the first president to explicitly link U.S. trade policy with China to progress on the Korean Peninsula. Trump knows that the art of the deal is based on leverage. North Korea’s economy depends on China, and China’s well-being depends on trade with the United States. Beijing has much less interest in defending the right of its erratic Pyongyang ally to develop highly destabilizing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles than it does in maintaining its global markets. This reality was no doubt the framework for discussions in March between Kim and Chinese President Xi Jinping, when Beijing told Pyongyang that the party was over.
Trump also made clear the potential consequences of not moving towards peace. Last year saw a series of threats and counter-threats as Kim took the measure of our new president. North Korea conducted provocative nuclear and missile tests. Pyongyang threatened to launch missiles towards America and said it had the right to down U.S. bombers even outside North Korea’s airspace. In response, Trump said that any North Korean acts of war would “be met with fire and fury ... the likes of which this world has never seen before.” Defense Secretary James Mattis laconically noted that if North Korea fired missiles towards the United States, it would be “game on.”
Trump is demonstrating that America can remain “the one indispensable nation in world affairs” (as his predecessor said) only if it behaves like it.
There is much yet to be done, of course. The outcome of the upcoming Trump/Kim summit will determine whether this prospective peace is durable or a mirage. But if all goes well and peace is finally at hand, a Nobel Prize for Trump would be a fitting tribute to his remarkable achievement.
James S. Robbins, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, served as a special assistant in the office of the secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration.
Hold the irrational exuberance on Kim Tom Nichols
The historic handshake between the leaders of North and South Korea has, for now, reduced the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula. Kim Jong Un even stepped across the line between the Koreas, becoming the first North Korean dictator to set foot in the South, even if only for a moment.
While these are welcome developments, they don’t justify the amount of, shall we say, irrational exuberance they’re producing. President Trump’s supporters are already talking about a Nobel Peace Prize.
It is difficult to know why Kim is, literally, putting his best foot forward. A more judicious inventory of the nuclear negotiations suggests multiple reasons for caution:
❚ North Korea has already achieved major diplomatic and strategic victories over the past year, while giving up exactly nothing. Pyongyang has tested nuclear weapons and long-range missiles at will. Months of heated threats from Washington were answered with equally muscular rhetoric. Kim stood fast: Today, the threats are over, but the arsenal remains.
In the wake of Trump’s empty fulminations, Kim seized the opportunity to look reasonable by comparison. Consequently, a leader who just a few years ago was an international pariah — a man, we might recall, who murdered his own half-brother in a chemical attack in an international airport — is being lauded as a diplomat.
❚ The Americans are doing all of this backward — deciding first to have a summit, and then trying to figure out why. Holding a summit without a firm agenda is always courting disaster. The North Koreans have nothing to lose here; a summit will buy them time for their nuclear program and make it harder for the West to stay united on sanctions. In the meantime, Kim is making offers that he will likely never honor.
❚ These negotiations seem to have some serious opponents in the administration, starting with national security adviser John Bolton. Bolton has cagily suggested that the deal to denuclearize Libya could serve as a template for a Korea deal. Bolton, of course, knows that the North Koreans pointed to Moammar Gadhafi’s abdication of his nuclear program as the reason the West toppled him. When Bolton equated a Korean deal with Libya, he might as well have warned Kim directly that regime change is in the cards.
It is possible, and we must hope, that North Korea’s leader has decided his state is unsustainable.
Even so, we should have no illusions about the price we have already paid to get this far, and prepare for the dangers that lie ahead if we find — as still seems likely — that we are being duped.
Tom Nichols is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and author of The Death of Expertise. The views expressed here are solely his own.