Kim Jong Un is the big winner. South Korea is a loser.
The Donald Trump-Kim Jong Un summit in Singapore is over. It ended with a largely vague declaration of principles, a series of photo ops, and a surprise: Trump’s announcement that he would suspend military exercises with South Korea as a gesture of goodwill to the North Koreans, a move that the government in Seoul wasn’t informed of before it was made.
So now it’s time to look at the big questions about the summit. What really happened? Did the US and North Korea each get what they wanted? And is the world a better or worse place for this having happened?
To try to answer these questions, we’ve put together a list of winners and losers from the meeting: which people and governments came out in a better position than they were in before the talks, and who was hurt by the way things shook down. Some of them are clear — Kim did astonishingly well — while others, like North Korea’s many political prisoners, were hurt in large part by not being mentioned very much at all.
Think of this as your one-stop guide to understanding what really happened Tuesday in Singapore.
Kim Jong Un is the leader of a tiny, deeply impoverished country. He’s a brutal dictator who starves and imprisons his own citizens. And he just got the president of the United States to fly halfway around the world to meet, shake his hand, and cancel military exercises with his greatest enemy — all without giving up anything major in return.
That’s a huge win.
North Korea’s leaders have long wanted to be seen as major players on the world stage and to be accorded the respect and legitimacy given to nuclear powers. And they’ve long viewed a one-on-one meeting with the president of the United States as a key way to attain that status.
Yet successive US presidents — from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama — have refused to meet face to face with North Korea’s leaders (either Kim Jong Un or his father, Kim Jong Il, who ruled until his death in 2011) for just that reason.
“Since I came into office, the one thing I was clear about was, we’re not going to reward this kind of provocative behavior,” then-President Obama said in 2013 about a possible meeting with Kim. “You don’t get to bang your spoon on the table and somehow you get your way.”
But that all changed when Trump took office — in part because of Trump’s personality and his belief in his own negotiating abilities, but also because North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities dramatically accelerated to the point that the US was basically running out of options by the time Trump took office.
“Kim Jong Un is desperately looking for international recognition of North Korea as a country in good standing, of his right to rule it, and of the legitimacy of his possession of nuclear weapons,” Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korea’s nuclear program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, writes at Foreign Policy .
Trump meeting with Kim, and praising his “ great personality ” in a presser after the summit, certainly gives him that win.
But it’s actually more than that. North Korea didn’t give up anything major in the joint statement after the summit. The language is incredibly soft, with North Korea not making any major concessions to the United States. It’s considerably weaker, in fact, than what previous presidents had gotten during multilateral negotiations with the North.
“Each of the four main points was in previous documents with NK, some in a stronger, more encompassing way,” Bruce Klingner, a former CIA deputy division chief for Korea, tweeted on Tuesday. “The [denuclearization] bullet is weaker than the Six Party Talks language.”
So Kim gave up nothing and got both a propaganda win and a pledge from the US to suspend military exercises with South Korea. It’s an incredible diplomatic coup.
Donald Trump sold himself to America as a tough and savvy negotiator who knew how to make a deal. But for most of his presidency, he had been tearing up deals — like the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal — rather than making them. In order to maintain his image as a dealmaker, Trump needed to pull off some kind of grand gesture.
Being the first US president to meet with a North Korean leader certainly is that.
Many pundits — one of us included — thought there was a very good chance the summit would never happen: that the sides were too far apart to even get to the table. The fact that Trump showed up the most pessimistic expectations is, on a PR level, a clear win.
But that analysis only holds up at the most superficial level. Substantively, Trump comes out of the summit as a loser — for basically the same reasons that Kim is a winner. The United States got nothing whatsoever from North Korea while handing Kim at least two major concessions (a propaganda win and the cancellation of US-South Korea military exercises). That’s not the outcome you want if you’re a master dealmaker.
“The denuclearization language in the joint statement is particularly weak,” James Acton, co-director of the Carnegie Institute’s Nuclear Policy Program, tweeted . “Diplomacy will rumble on for the time being, but I am not optimistic about the longer term.”
Nor, experts say, should Trump get a lot of credit for lowering the risk of war. It was Trump whose harsh “fire and fury” rhetoric, in response to North Korea’s missile tests last year, brought us to the brink of conflict; the fact that he’s changed his mind on the value of brinksmanship doesn’t exactly make him a great diplomat.
“Summit is better than nuclear war, but the threat of war was of Trump’s own making,” writes Mira Rapp-Hooper, an expert on North Korea at Yale Law School. “Let’s be cautious not to award points for mitigated lunacy.”
So the best way to think about Trump’s outcome here is that he, like Kim, gets a propaganda win — but unlike Kim, he ended up a substantive loser.
Here are some things that weren’t mentioned at any point in the statement issued after the summit: North Korean political prisoners, brutal labor camps, and the starvation crisis.
There’s a reason North Korea is widely considered the most repressive country on earth. Somewhere between 80,000 and 130,000 North Koreans are currently held as political prisoners by their own government, detained in brutal and vicious gulags. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans have died in these gulags over the past several decades; summary executions and systematic rape are relatively common occurrences.
Thomas Buergenthal, an eminent international lawyer and Auschwitz survivor, helped prepare a chilling report on these camps last year. He told the Washington Post that “the conditions in the Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps.”
Meanwhile, North Korea has devoted tremendous resources to its nuclear program and military, at the expense of the basic needs of its citizens. UNICEF estimated in January that 60,000 North Korean children were on the brink of starvation.
The Trump-Kim agreement does nothing to help these people — even though, in his post-summit presser, Trump declared political prisoners “ one of the great winners today. ”
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with negotiating with leaders of repressive countries. You have to talk with world leaders with whom you have profound disagreements; otherwise, what’s the point of talking?
The problem, though, is giving entirely short shrift to human rights — barely even mentioning it — while handing Kim Jong Un a propaganda victory he can use to make his regime seem more legitimate in the eyes of his people. There is a way to handle these things, to express concern about the problematic human rights situation in North Korea and even try to get Pyongyang to take action on it, without tanking nonproliferation talks. Trump didn’t do that.
Trump canceling US military exercises with South Korea is a big, big deal.
The exercises are fairly regular — the next one is scheduled for August — and an important tool for reassuring South Korea that the US is committed to its defense. They also show North Korea that the alliance is durable and serious, thus deterring it from any kind of military probe to test American and South Korean resolve.
It’s even more significant because the South Koreans didn’t know about it in advance, and still aren’t sure what it means.
