While the collapse of the Donald Trump-Kim Jung Un summit should cause the president to reconsider how to prepare for head of state summits, it should…
While the collapse of the Donald Trump-Kim Jung Un summit should cause the president to reconsider how to prepare for head of state summits, it should not alter the Trump administration’s strategic objective of complete and permanent denuclearization of North Korea for several important reasons.
The leverage of sanctions is greatest now. Since the end of the Cold War and the rise of the global economy, we have entered a new era of arms control/non-proliferation policy where the leverage to stop these programs and reverse them comes from multilateral sanctions. Multilateral sanctions have reached an important apex with North Korea, with increased Chinese support for the Trump administration’s sanctions policy in the UN Security Council and with significant success in encouraging countries across the globe to diplomatically isolate North Korea.
Arms control dependent on the persuasion of sanctions limits the utility of phased negotiations. As sanctions weaken in response to step by step moves, sanctions pressure decreases just as the slow burn approach to negotiations has to deal with the final phases of complete denuclearization. A sanctions dependent arms control policy sharply limits the effectiveness of step by step negotiations or time-bound constraints, one of the major concerns with the time bound limits of the Iran agreement.
Furthermore, the nuclear genie is out of the North Korean bottle and a freeze does not diminish that threat.
