CALIFORNIA: The historic Trump–Kim Singapore summit in June and subsequent high-level meetings offer a diplomatic opening on the Korean Peninsula. Progress has been…
CALIFORNIA: The historic Trump–Kim Singapore summit in June and subsequent high-level meetings offer a diplomatic opening on the Korean Peninsula.
Progress has been made on the non-nuclear fronts of the Singapore deal, such as the suspension of the US–South Korean joint military exercises and the repatriation of the remains of the US prisoners of war.
But the current cold streak of progress on denuclearisation suggests that North Korea is determined to set as slow a pace as possible.
Real challenges await the region as it sets out on this long, bumpy journey to navigate the difficulties of denuclearisation and at the same time deal with an unpredictable, secretive and cunning regime. These challenges must be dealt with before any meaningful technical steps can be made.
US demands for rapid denuclearisation and its obsession with the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation (CVID) of North Korea do not offer much hope for progress.
UNITED STATES UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS
CVID is not a realistic goal, as any denuclearisation deal — big or small, vague or specific — with the current North Korean regime is almost certainly reversible.
With too much focus on CVID, there is a risk that recent productive developments will be scrapped, in the same way that previous flashes of hope have quickly dimmed.
The most pressing goal with North Korea is obviously denuclearisation but any efforts towards this goal should be in accord with a bigger, more comprehensive picture — that is, to transform the North Korean regime into a denuclearised normal state.
The objective of the United States and its allies should not be to defeat the regime but rather to help it build normal relations with the outside world and to secure its future as a normal state.
Despite the media frenzy over the recent diplomatic developments with North Korea, any nuclear deal could quickly prove ephemeral.
Even if US President Donald Trump had struck a „grand deal“ on CVID with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, what is the real value of such a deal when Kim — or Trump himself — could scrap it at his convenience?
CVID would have been useful in 2003 when it was first introduced as a framework for North Korea’s then still-nascent nuclear program.
