Leaders to meet first, deal later
TRUMP, KIM ‘BREAK ALL THE RULES’ OF DIPLOMACY
>> WASHINGTON: President Trump and Kim Jong-un are prepping for a role reversal summit — First the leaders meet, then aides try to work out the hard details of a complex agreement.
It’s one of many unusual aspects of a unique summit that Mr Trump announced out of the blue in early March, canceled late last month after North Korean criticism and then rescheduled on June 1.
“We’re forgetting how weird all this is,” said Thomas Wright, a senior fellow with the Washington-based Brookings Institution. “Everything about this is weird.”
Mr Trump granted Mr Kim the prestige of a major summit without extracting meaningful concessions regarding the elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, analysts said.
The Trump-Kim agenda remains in flux, they said. It could come to include US concessions on economic sanctions toward North Korea, the commitment of American troops to South Korea, and the prospects of a peace treaty between the two Korea.
“They’re kind of circumventing the usual diplomatic model,” said Abigail Grace, research associate with the Asia-Pacific Security Programme at the Centre for New American Security.
Trump administration officials are happy to say their approach is unusual.
It fits the former businessman’s negotiating style, officials said, and previous, more traditional diplomatic efforts did not get the North Koreans to give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons.
“The approach that President Trump is taking is fundamentally different,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “In the past, there have been months and months of detailed negotiations, and it got nowhere. This has already driven us to a place we’ve not been able to achieve before.”
Mr Trump himself said that “one-week preparations” for a big event simply “don’t work,” and that his life experience makes him ready to deal with the North Koreans.
“I’ve been preparing for this all my life,” Mr Trump told reporters on Friday as he left for the G-7 summit in Canada, en route to Singapore for the Kim meeting that takes place on Tuesday morning, local time.
Mr Pompeo noted that negotiators have been discussing the meeting agenda for weeks at meetings in the Demilitarised Zone between North and South Korea.
Having met with Mr Kim twice, Mr Pompeo said that “he’s prepared to denuclearise,” and the North Koreans have shown good faith by returning US hostages and destroying a few weapons test sites.
Analysts said North Korea hasn’t given up anything meaningful, and has not provided his own definition of denuclearisation, which could involved withdrawal of US troops and weapons from the region.
Ryan Hass, a foreign policy fellow with the Brookings Institution, said he views “the key question” will be “how much precision are both leaders prepared to apply to the aspirations.”
Mr Trump is “hopeful,” Mr Pompeo said, but is also headed to Singapore “with his eyes wide open.”
Whatever happens, the secretary of State said that Mr Trump will not sign a “bad deal” on North Korean nukes.
“The United States has been clear, time and time again, that complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula is the only outcome that we will find acceptable,” Mr Pompeo said.
There have been hastily prepared summits before.
Less than five months after his 1961 inauguration, a less-than-prepared President John F Kennedy travelled to Vienna to meet Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The veteran Soviet leader rhetorically bludgeoned the young president, and the leaders failed to find common ground on issues like the fate of divided Berlin.
During a largely thrown-together summit in Iceland in 1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev suddenly found themselves discussing the abolition of nuclear weapons, to the horror of some of their advisers. That summit fell apart when Mr Gorbachev demanded the end to Reagan’s plan for a missile defence system known as “Star Wars.”
In the months that followed, aides began work on an arms control treaty that Reagan and Mr Gorbachev signed at a more traditional pre-scripted summit held in 1987.
That’s the way it usually works: Aides will spend months negotiating the details and getting the documents ready — THEN the leaders will call a summit to sign documents and pose for photos.
Aaron David Miller, a negotiator for State Departments of both political parties, said the Camp David summit of 2000 involving former US president Bill Clinton and Middle East leaders came after “a year-plus of meetings” among lower-level aides.
Summits of the past have involved long-standing debates like arms control and Middle East peace, and have involved leaders who have known each other and have experience dealing with these kinds of issues.
A unique approach may be required in this situation, some analysts said, given two unpredictable leaders and the nature of the North Korea regime.
Mr Trump is a businessman-turned-politician who has held public office for less than two years; Mr Kim, the son and grandson of previous North Korean leaders, is the reclusive ruler who seems obsessed with nuclear weapons, and has been accused of murdering aides and family members he has considered disloyal.
No American president has ever met “with the leader of a country who is on the terrorism list” and is “a serial human rights abuser,” Mr Miller said.
It’s quite possible that Mr Trump and Mr Kim will get along well and establish a framework for moving forward, but “what follows is much less certain,” Mr Miller said.
“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” he added. “The whole thing in many ways is surreal.”