Experts fear talks would be worst option

Trump changes tune on Kim meet, again

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump vowed on Wednesday that he would not talk with Kim Jong-un, but some fear less that Mr Trump is going to start a war with Mr Kim than that he is going to stumble into a risky, unpredictable dialogue with him.

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

But a meeting between Mr Trump and Mr Kim, these experts said, could open the door to ratifying the North’s nuclear status or scaling back America’s joint military exercises with Seoul. That could sunder US alliances with Japan and South Korea and benefit 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 Russel, who served until March as the assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs. “All of this is focused on pressuring the US to enter direct talks with Kim on his terms. That is the big trap.”

Previous presidents avoided that trap, Mr Russel said, even if Bill Clinton briefly contemplated meeting Mr Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il. But Mr Trump brings a dealmaker’s swagger to the North Korea issue that his predecessors did not. He has in the past expressed a willingness to sit across a table from the willful young scion of North Korea’s ruling family.

“I would have no problem speaking to him,” Mr Trump said during the presidential campaign. In April, he said, “If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely.”

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, Mr Trump’s former chief strategist, reflected that internal consensus when he told The American Prospect magazine: “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, Mr Tillerson said recently, there is a “pathway to sometime in the early future having some dialogue”.

For now, a Trump-Kim summit remains far-fetched. Even if North Korea was interested, its string of belligerent actions — not to mention the June death of Otto Warmbier, the US student held for nearly 18 months in Pyongyang — would make a meeting politically untenable for Mr Trump.

Other experts said it was not diplomacy itself that was problematic but that Mr Trump, acting alone, could be an unpredictable negotiator.

“Trump is not the first president to think he can make a deal with these guys,” said Michael Auslin, a research fellow at Stanford University. “Bill Clinton thought he was the great negotiator. His aides thought if they could get him in a room with Kim Jong-il, they could seal a deal. There’s clearly a sense, because of the capriciousness of Trump and the Art of the Deal, he could do the same.”

Some experts said the North Koreans would never allow the Americans to determine either the setting or the terms of any meeting. For a dealmaker and showman like Mr Trump, that would probably be unacceptable.

“I suspect that in the end, the president might fall back on his event-planning background,” said Michael Green, who served as a top Asia adviser to Mr Bush. “This is not a Miss Universe pageant or a pro wrestling match, so that might stop Trump in his tracks.”