The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT TRUMP’S TALKS WITH N. KOREA
President Donald Trump has accepted North Korea’s invitation for direct talks with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, to be held by May. It’s a big deal, but you’re probably wondering how big a deal, what it means and how to think about it. Here are some things I’ve learned in the past few years from covering North Korea, diplomacy and, more recently, the Trump administration’s unusual approach to foreign policy.
Short term, it reduces the risk of war
Even just preparing for talks changes North Korean and U.S. incentives in ways that make us all less likely to be obliterated in a fiery nuclear inferno. That’s good.
The biggest risk was probably always an accident or miscalculation that slid into unintended war, or maybe a unilateral U.S. strike that escalated out of control.
This more or less takes those scenarios off the table. Both sides now have reason to reduce rather than increase tensions, to read one another’s actions as peaceful rather than hostile and to preserve the diplomatic efforts in which both have invested political capital.
Still, that only lasts until the talks themselves.
Mismatched signals may have set up the talks to fail
Usually, before high-level talks like these, both sides spend a long time telegraphing their expected outcomes.
Such signals serve as public commitments, both to the other side of the negotiation and to citizens back home. It’s a way for both sides to test each other’s demands and offers, reducing the risk of surprise or embarrassment.
That is not really how things have proceeded with the United States and North Korea. Trump has already committed to granting North Korea one of its most desired concessions: a high-level meeting between the heads of state.
In exchange, North Korea has not publicly committed to anything. It has, quite cannily, channeled its public communications through South Korea, making it easier to renege.
Further, Trump has declared “denuclearization” as his minimal acceptable outcome for talks, making it harder for him to accept a more modest (but more achievable) outcome and costlier for him to walk away.
The table is now set in such a way that virtually any outcome is a win for North Korea, but only a very narrow and difficult range of outcomes will save the United States from an embarrassing failure.
The North Koreans can walk away more freely, while the Americans will be more desperate to come home with some sort of win. It’s a formulation that puts the Americans at significant disadvantage before talks even begin.
The sides do not agree on the point of talking
It’s worth belaboring the costs of skipping the usual process of mutual public signaling.
South Korean officials have said Kim is willing to enter talks for “denuclearization,” which is perhaps why Trump seems to believe this will happen.
But Duyeon Kim, a Seoul-based analyst, writes in a column in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that “denuclearization” means vastly different things to the United States and North Korea.
Americans understand the word as describing North Korea’s full nuclear disarmament, which is very difficult to imagine happening.
But North Koreans, she writes, tend to mean it as a kind of mutual and incremental disarmament in which the United States also gives up weapons.
Normally, the United States and North Korea would have issued months, even years, of public statements on their goals for direct talks, to clear all this up.
But, again, the Americans have made splashy public commitments while letting the North Koreans get by without doing the same.
The Trump administration has gotten the process backward
It’s practically an axiom of international diplomacy that you only bring heads of state together
at the very end of talks, after lower-level officials have done the dirty work.
Negotiators need to be free to back down from demands. Or to contradict themselves. Or to play good cop, bad cop. Or to walk away. Lower-level officials can lose face or sacrifice credibility for the sake of talks. Heads of state are much too constrained.
Robert E. Kelly, a professor at South Korea’s Pusan National University, wrote on Twitter that, in a more typical process, “there would be a series of concessions and counter-concessions building trust and credibility over time (likely years) eventually rising to a serious discussion of denuclearization.”
Instead, the Trump administration is jumping straight to the last step.
There is little obvious gain in skipping over a process that is intended to lock North Korea into public commitments, test what is achievable and ensure maximum U.S. leverage and flexibility.
There is potentially significant downside, though. Victor Cha, a well-respected North Korea expert, warns in a New York Times Op-Ed essay, “Failed negotiations at the summit level leave all parties with no other recourse for diplomacy.”
The State Department is shorthanded
Wouldn’t this be a good moment to have a U.S. ambassador to South Korea? Or an undersecretary of state for arms control and international security?
Both posts are empty. The desk for assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs is occupied by a respected but interim official who has clashed with the White House. Her boss, the undersecretary for political affairs, is retiring.
And CIA Director Mike Pompeo has been nominated to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state.
Trump lacks the institutional support and assistance that more experienced presidents found essential. There will be fewer high-level diplomats to run parallel talks, fewer midlevel officials to assist and brief the president, fewer analysts to feel out North Korean intentions and capabilities.
This is why the emerging conventional wisdom among analysts, as summed up by The Economist, is that “Mr. Trump — a man who boasts about his television ratings and who is bored by briefings and scornful of foreign alliances — could end up being played like a gold-plated violin.”
North Korea has achieved a symbolic victory
For North Korea, high-level talks are a big win in their own right. Kim seeks to transform his country from a rogue pariah into an established nuclear power, a peer to the United States, a player on the international stage.
That wins Kim international acknowledgment and heightened status, as well as significant domestic credibility.
“Kim is not inviting Trump so that he can surrender North Korea’s weapons,” Jeffrey Lewis, a Korea expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, wrote on Twitter. “Kim is inviting Trump to demonstrate that his investment in nuclear and missile capabilities has forced the United States to treat him as an equal.”
That’s been a North Korean priority since the 1990s.
Trump is granting Kim that victory, thereby surrendering one of the United States’ last remaining opportunities to extract something from North Korea, without getting anything demonstrable in return.
North Korea is likely to enter talks with other goals, and the United States does wield other leverage, so it could yet come to something. But with this concession granted and the two parties not even sure of each other’s positions on other matters, that may be the end of it.