Evan Osnos writes about what might happen if Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un meet to discuss a nuclear agreement between the United States and North Korea.
On February 21st, 1972, President Richard Nixon arrived in Beijing to
meet with Chairman Mao Zedong, ending twenty-five years of hostility
between the United States and China. The preparations had been
painstaking: more than three years earlier, Henry Kissinger, the
national-security adviser, began hinting to Beijing that Nixon might be
the President to reopen relations. In 1971, Kissinger held secret
meetings with Premier Zhou Enlai, logging dozens of hours of
negotiations. That July, Nixon announced his plan, but it took another
seven months of diplomatic preparation before he finally ventured to
China for what he rightly called a “week that changed the world.”
By comparison, Donald Trump’s decision to meet with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, is unfolding in an instant. On Thursday, upon
learning that South Korea’s national-security adviser, Chung Eui-yong,
was in the West Wing, meeting with various officials, Trump asked him
into the Oval Office. When Chung told Trump that Kim wanted to meet with him, Trump gave an immediate yes and invited Chung to announce to the
White House press corps the most audacious diplomatic gamble by an
American President in decades. If the meeting takes place—and that is by
no means guaranteed—it will be the first-ever encounter between a sitting
American President and a leader of North Korea since the founding of
that nation, in 1948.
Many diplomats were appalled by the announcement of a Presidential
summit without the usual stages of lower-level talks in advance. But a
senior Administration official told reporters that the White House is
happy to depart from the usual rules of diplomacy with North Korea. “Literally, going back to 1992, the United States has engaged in direct
talks at low levels with the North Koreans, and I think that history
speaks for itself,” the official said.
The prospect that Trump might attempt a breakthrough on North Korea,
much as Nixon, the once-virulent anti-Communist, had turned toward
China, has been a tantalizing prospect since Trump’s election. In a prescient essay published a year ago in Foreign Affairs, John Delury,
a North Korea expert at Yonsei University, in Seoul, wrote, “Like it or
not, North Korea’s nukes are a reality. The United States needs a new
strategy for dealing with Kim—and Trump is well placed to deliver it.”
According to the White House, the summit is due to happen “by May,”
leaving a narrow window to settle three essential questions:
Officially, the American objective at the summit is to secure a firm agreement that North Korea
will give up its nuclear weapons.
