Do not pay attention to Trump’s stated goals. Pay attention to what’s realistic.
Donald Trump didn’t get much in the way of North Korean denuclearization in Singapore. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
In the days since the summit with Kim Jong Un, critics— including me —have pointed out how little the U. S. president got from North Korea’s leader during their much-hyped meeting. And it’s true that Trump fell far short in that meeting of his stated goal to fully dismantle North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, and then wildly overstated his achievement by declaring the North Korean nuclear threat over. ( It’s not .) But the Trump administration racked up real accomplishments in Singapore that are perhaps best understood by setting aside the president’s grand (and at times groundless) pronouncements. The summit’s modest and provisional results are actually of considerable consequence.
Here’s a rundown of why Trump can reasonably make the case that the Singapore summit was successful and that the United States and the world are safer now than they were before he decided to become the first American president to meet with North Korea’s leader.
1) U. S. concessions to North Korea so far are largely reversible.
If North Korea hasn’t yet given up a lot in negotiations, neither has the United States. Trump can’t retract his decision to hold a summit with and even speak admiringly of the dictatorial rule of Kim Jong Un, just like Kim can’t walk back his decision to release American hostages ahead of the summit. But Trump is right to state that while he has suspended upcoming U. S.-South Korea military exercises that he considers “provocative,” he can always reinstate the drills if nuclear talks collapse. Likewise, the Trump administration has refrained from imposing new sanctions on North Korea as diplomacy proceeds and, in engaging North Korea, has potentially weakened the resolve of countries such as China and South Korea to enforce existing sanctions. But here again, there’s been no easing of U. S. sanctions in exchange for North Korea’s vague, noncommittal promise of denuclearization in Singapore.
This, of course, isn’t all that surprising: Goodwill gestures at the outset of negotiations, when there’s little trust among the parties, tend to be provisional. Experts suspect, for instance, that the North Koreans may still be able to reopen the nuclear-test site that they claimed to have destroyed with great fanfare in the lead-up to the summit.
2) The United States and North Korea are now talking to each other rather than threatening war.
It was just six months ago that Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator and Trump confidant, was telling me there was a 70-percent chance of the president launching an all-out war against the Kim regime if North Korea tested another nuclear device. A month later, Tammy Duckworth, the Democratic senator and military veteran, returned from South Korea and told me that U. S. forces appeared to be operating with the attitude that a conflict “will probably happen, and we better be ready to go.” A Russian academic came back from Pyongyang with a chilling report: The North Korean government “is not bluffing when it says that ‘only one question remains: When will war break out?’” With each test of a bomb or long-range missile, the North moved closer to the capability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons—a development the Trump administration had vowed to prevent at all costs.
Whether or not hostilities were truly imminent, the military brinkmanship was real. And in this climate, people weren’t exactly holding their breath for a swift, negotiated end to the North Korean nuclear program. Around the time that Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” in August, the nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker, who has visited North Korea’s nuclear facilities several times, argued that the most immediate task for U. S. policymakers was not to address North Korea’s nuclear weapons but to avoid stumbling into nuclear war on the Korean peninsula. He urged Trump to send military and diplomatic officials to Pyongyang to simply talk with and learn more about their North Korean counterparts, and thereby reduce tensions and the risk of dangerous miscalculation. Graham, one of the leading North Korea hawks in Congress, surprisingly went further. When we spoke he wouldn’t rule out a Kim-Trump summit, then a fanciful idea. “I’m not taking anything off the table to avoid a war,” he said.
If these recommendations seemed prudent and urgent at the time, it’s hard to argue only half a year later that the Singapore summit and the flurry of direct, lower-level talks preceding it are meaningless or even reckless. Within months of Duckworth warning darkly that the U. S. military had “seen the writing on the wall,” Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un were signing a statement in which they pledged to jointly “build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean peninsula.” That’s astonishing.
3) Any North Korean denuclearization pledge is remarkable.
Critics of Trump’s North Korea summit have pointed out that Kim’s commitment to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula” by some unspecified time—squishy wording that might entail the nuclear-armed United States ending its military alliance with South Korea and concluding a peace treaty with North Korea—is actually weaker than the North’s vow in a 2005 statement to abandon “all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs” at “an early date” and pursue the goal of “verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
