The good, the bad, and the ugly about Trump’s upcoming summit with Kim Jong-un.
In a stunning and unexpected move, President Donald Trump announced last week that he will meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — setting the stage for the first-ever presidential-level U. S.-North Korea summit. His announcement came after a South Korean delegation, en route back from Pyongyang, visited the White House, and told Trump that they believed Kim was “frank and sincere” about talking to the United States about denuclearization.
After a year where breakthroughs seemed impossible amid continuous North Korean nuclear and missile testing, has South Korea managed to find an opening that might lead to denuclearization of, and peace on, the Korean Peninsula? Or are we simply witnessing yet another episode of North Korea stringing Seoul and Washington along, with the ultimate goal of breaking their alliance? The optimists’ fantasy is that Trump could convince Kim to relinquish his nuclear weapons as a unilateral concession, while pessimists fear that Kim will tell Trump to take a hike, thereby cementing the path to war.
As is often the case, however, the most realistic outcome lies somewhere in the middle. With sufficient preparation and expectations properly set, the United States could make progress with North Korea short of denuclearization — progress that will ultimately be stabilizing, reduce the risk of war, and perhaps even cap North Korea’s nuclear force development. Getting to that “good” outcome will require coming to terms with the idea that the “perfect” goal — complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization — is not really on the table, even if Kim says it is.
How We Got Here
After their visit to Pyongyang, the South Korean envoys released a six-point statement outlining their understanding of what Kim had agreed to. Notably, the statement announced: “North Korea showed its resolve for denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula… there is no reason for them to possess nuclear weapons as long as military threats to the north are eliminated and the regime’s security is guaranteed.” Furthermore, according to the South, the North signaled that it was willing to begin discussions with the United States on this issue and “made it clear that it will not resume strategic provocations such as additional nuclear tests or ballistic missile tests while the dialogue continues.”
Importantly, as of this writing, the announcement has not been corroborated by authoritative North Korean sources. A diplomat at the North Korean mission to the United Nations spoke to the Washington Post about the upcoming summit, but simply attributed the fact of the invitation to Kim’s “broad minded and resolute decision.” (The word “denuclearization” is nowhere to be seen in any North Korean statements.)
Nevertheless, after meeting with Kim in Pyongyang, National Security Advisor Chung Eui-yong, and South Korea’s spy chief Suh Hoon headed to Washington to tell Trump that they believed Kim was “sincere.” Despite concerns raised by his advisors, Trump accepted the invitation, reportedly on the spot, and Chung announced the news at a hastily-arranged press conference in the White House driveway. It was South Korea-led shuttle diplomacy in full swing.
Nearly a week later, significant confusion persists. It remains unclear both what the South Koreans heard from Kim in Pyongyang and what they told Trump. Chung’s statement in Washington suggested that he had told Trump that denuclearization will be on the table when the U. S. president meets Kim. It’s unclear if Chung clarified the l ongstanding North Korean conditionality around denuclearization. Meanwhile, South Korea’s Ministry of Unification says it has received no official communication from North Korea about a U. S.-North Korea summit, casting doubt over the entire enterprise. South Korean sources report that the Blue House (the presidential office) is holding its cards close, with just a handful of officials maintaining full knowledge of what exactly transpired in Pyongyang. For their part, Japan and China have been understandably concerned about being sidelined, having been blindsided by the whirlwind South Korean diplomacy, even further complicating alliance management and diplomacy on the Peninsula.
All this leaves an uneasy impression that South Korea is shuttling between the United States and North Korea trying to orchestrate a diplomatic opening based on very little overlap in preferences between Washington and Pyongyang.
A Concession Up Front
Trump believes that Kim has already made a concession and will adhere to a missile and nuclear testing moratorium until a summit takes place. But in accepting the invitation and possibly granting Kim a one-on-one summit, Trump has given North Korea a far greater victory, something no North Korean leader has yet achieved: a seat at the table as an equal, presumably as an equivalent nuclear weapons power. Thus, the administration has made a concession up front, despite the administration’s exhortations to the contrary.
Can Trump walk away with something himself, the breakthrough everyone is hoping for: North Korea voluntarily relinquishing its nuclear weapons program? Almost certainly not. But that does not mean the meeting is doomed for failure — or that the costs of allowing Kim his photo-op should stand in the way of diplomatic progress. This summit could be a highly risky venture that could nonetheless yield substantial upsides, such as a sustained freeze in North Korean testing and development work on ballistic missiles, along with other confidence building and nonproliferation measures. A serious downside, however, remains: it could seal the path to war, emboldening the most hawkish voices in the administration, if Trump walks away with nothing and blames Kim for double-crossing him and South Korea for setting him up.
The Bad News: Voluntary Denuclearization is Extremely Unlikely
The South Korean announcement that denuclearization is on the table calls for measured optimism. The reality, however, is that denuclearization has always been on the table — but only in theory, and only if the United States agrees to essentially impossible demands. North Korea is not going to give up its nuclear weapons for a lollipop. It will likely come at a hefty price to the United States and to the U. S.-South Korea alliance, one that they may not be willing to pay (and should not be willing to pay).
The day after North Korea’s first-ever successful ICBM test last July, state media quoted Kim as saying that his country:
would neither put its nukes and ballistic rockets on the table of negotiations in any case nor flinch even an inch from the road of bolstering the nuclear force chosen by itself unless the US hostile policy and nuclear threat to the DPRK are definitely terminated. (emphasis added)
Let’s talk through what that statement might actually imply. Few analysts have seen fit to take the conditional offer at face value. But for the North Koreans, this is very much a sincere statement of intent: so long as the United States “definitely terminate[s]” the “hostile policy and nuclear threat to the DPRK,” they would be willing to denuclearize. The “hostile policy” is the chief North Korean grievance about the United States since the conclusion of the Korean War; it refers to a basket of policies, including the U. S. decision to permanently forward-base troops in Northeast Asia and extend its nuclear umbrella to South Korea. The term is also used to describe tactical maneuvers, like U. S. bomber assurance and deterrence flights near the peninsula.
While we don’t know precisely how North Korea defines the “hostile policy”, it helps to conceive of the maximalist case — the ad absurdum request.
