Do not pay attention to Trump\u2019s stated goals. Pay attention to what\u2019s realistic.<\/b>
\nDonald Trump didn\u2019t get much in the way of North Korean denuclearization in Singapore. And that\u2019s not necessarily a bad thing.
In the days since the summit with Kim Jong Un, critics\u2014 including me \u2014have pointed out how little the U. S. president got from North Korea\u2019s leader during their much-hyped meeting. And it\u2019s true that Trump fell far short in that meeting of his stated goal to fully dismantle North Korea\u2019s nuclear-weapons program, and then wildly overstated his achievement by declaring the North Korean nuclear threat over. ( It\u2019s not .) But the Trump administration racked up real accomplishments in Singapore that are perhaps best understood by setting aside the president\u2019s grand (and at times groundless) pronouncements. The summit\u2019s modest and provisional results are actually of considerable consequence.
Here\u2019s 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\u2019s leader.
1) U. S. concessions to North Korea so far are largely reversible.
If North Korea hasn\u2019t yet given up a lot in negotiations, neither has the United States. Trump can\u2019t retract his decision to hold a summit with and even speak admiringly of the dictatorial rule of Kim Jong Un, just like Kim can\u2019t 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 \u201cprovocative,\u201d 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\u2019s been no easing of U. S. sanctions in exchange for North Korea\u2019s vague, noncommittal promise of denuclearization in Singapore.
This, of course, isn\u2019t all that surprising: Goodwill gestures at the outset of negotiations, when there\u2019s 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 \u201cwill probably happen, and we better be ready to go.\u201d A Russian academic\u00a0 came back from Pyongyang with a chilling report: The North Korean government \u201cis not bluffing when it says that \u2018only one question remains: When will war break out?\u2019\u201d 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\u2014a 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\u2019t exactly holding their breath for a swift, negotiated end to the North Korean nuclear program. Around the time that Trump threatened North Korea with \u201cfire and fury\u201d in August, the nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker, who has visited North Korea\u2019s nuclear facilities several times, argued that the most immediate task for U. S. policymakers was not to address North Korea\u2019s 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\u2019t rule out a Kim-Trump summit, then a fanciful idea. \u201cI\u2019m not taking anything off the table to avoid a war,\u201d he said.
If these recommendations seemed prudent and urgent at the time, it\u2019s 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 \u201cseen the writing on the wall,\u201d Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un were signing a statement in which they pledged to jointly \u201cbuild a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean peninsula.\u201d That\u2019s astonishing.
3) Any North Korean denuclearization pledge is remarkable.
Critics of Trump\u2019s North Korea summit have pointed out that Kim\u2019s commitment to \u201cwork toward complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula\u201d by some unspecified time\u2014squishy wording that might entail the nuclear-armed United States ending its military alliance with South Korea and concluding a peace treaty with North Korea\u2014is actually weaker than the North\u2019s vow in a 2005 statement to abandon \u201call nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs\u201d at \u201can early date\u201d and pursue the goal of \u201cverifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.\u201d
But this is comparing apples to oranges\u2014or several bombs\u2019 worth of plutonium to a bristling nuclear-weapons arsenal, as it were. While North Korea had declared itself a nuclear power in 2005, it hadn\u2019t yet tested a nuclear bomb. Thirteen years later it has tested six, including most recently a suspected thermonuclear weapon 17 times as strong as the bomb that devastated Hiroshima\u2014plus last year\u2019s successful tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles that may be able to carry nuclear warheads to the United States. The deficiencies in the language notwithstanding, it\u2019s remarkable that a now nearly full-fledged nuclear power would agree in writing to anything involving the ceding of that status. (Granted, the parties to the international Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which include the United States and other nuclear states, sign on to similarly aspirational disarmament goals.) Also notable: North Korean state media has released a documentary on the Singapore summit that shows viewers the agreed-to language on denuclearization.
The 2005 statement, moreover, came after years of negotiations, not mere months as in the case of the 2018 statement. And the 2005 denuclearization pledge was accompanied by written assurances from the Bush administration to not attack North Korea and to offer it energy and economic assistance. The 2018 denuclearization pledge was made without any such written assurances from the Trump administration, though the president and other U. S. officials\u00a0 verbally echoed these promises before the summit.
4) For the moment, some conditions for a realistic, halfway-decent nuclear deal with North Korea are in place.
In March, just hours before Trump announced his intention to meet with Kim Jong Un, former U. S. Defense Secretary Bill Perry gave me a bleak assessment of what nuclear talks with North Korea could realistically achieve.
In the 1990s, Perry had spearheaded an effort by the Clinton administration to reach a comprehensive agreement for North Korea to abandon its nuclear program and its work on long-range missiles in return for a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War, the gradual normalization of U. S.-North Korean relations, and other concessions. Had the 2000 U. S. presidential election not gotten in the way, the deal may well have succeeded. But Perry argued that what might have bought North Korean denuclearization a couple decades ago had much less purchase today. He suggested offering these same incentives to North Korea if it instituted a ban on nuclear and missile tests, which would be much easier to verify than a more sweeping agreement on the country\u2019s sprawling nuclear infrastructure. (We might not know if North Korea is disclosing all its nuclear weapons and facilities, but we do know when it explodes bombs underground or fires rockets into the Sea of Japan.)
\u201cIn 1999 we had a chance of getting denuclearization. I do not believe we will get that today,\u201d Perry told me. A moratorium on tests, while far from a grand bargain, \u201cwould be worth having,\u201d he argued, because it would keep Kim from refining the long-range nuclear capability that directly threatens the United States. The Trump administration, he added, could also try to get North Korea to limit the number of nuclear weapons in its arsenal, not build new and improved ones, and not transfer nuclear weapons and technology to other states or non-state actors, though all of these moves would be more difficult to verify. Perry\u2019s proposal essentially aimed to keep a nuclear program that is already a fait accompli from growing more dangerous.
Diplomacy with North Korea hasn\u2019t yet produced even this limited nuclear deal. But as talks proceed it has resulted in a de facto freeze of the North\u2019s tests of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, which Kim announced in April. That means that for the time being, North Korea isn\u2019t experimenting (publicly at least) with its new intercontinental ballistic missiles, detonating nuclear devices, or test-firing nuclear-tipped missiles over the Pacific Ocean as it threatened to do last fall\u2014all of which would signal advances in the North Korean nuclear program and bring the United States and North Korean closer to military conflict.
Tentatively suspending U. S.-South Korea military exercises while North Korea tentatively suspends its nuclear and missile tests is very far off from the \u201ccomplete, verifiable, and irreversible\u201d dismantling of North Korea\u2019s nuclear program that the Trump administration has demanded. But it\u2019s closer to what Perry has described as a workable outcome of negotiations.
5) Trump is experimenting with a promising politics-first approach to the North Korean nuclear crisis.
In jumpstarting talks with a head-of-state summit, Trump didn\u2019t only reverse the bottom-up process that has shaped inconclusive nuclear negotiations with North Korea over the last 25 years. He also appeared to be prioritizing the transformation of relations between the United States and North Korea over the technical details of constraining the North\u2019s nuclear capabilities. \u201cPresident Trump places great faith in his own ability to relate to others on a personal basis, and so it does seem like he wants to bolster the political relationship [with Kim] and then trust that will lead to arms control,\u201d James Holmes of the U. S. Naval War College told me. \u201cPolitics leads, international law lags. We appear to be about to put this idea to the test.\u201d
And while we don\u2019t yet know the results of the test, this novel approach could potentially succeed in reducing the North Korean nuclear threat, if not eliminating it altogether. If the classic definition of a security threat is the combination of intent and capability to cause harm, U. S officials have tended to fixate on blunting North Korea\u2019s capabilities rather than addressing intent. But intent matters too. As the German political scientist Alexander Wendt once noted, \u201c500 British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than 5 North Korean nuclear weapons, because the British are friends of the United States and the North Koreans are not.\u201d
If there\u2019s any chance of North Korea doing what only one country in history has done before\u2014relinquishing nuclear weapons that it built and controls\u2014it would probably be as a result of a massive shift in Kim Jong Un\u2019s perception of security threats and personal and political calculations. (North Korea claims that the purpose of its nuclear program is to deter U. S. aggression.) F. W. de Klerk, the former South African president who made that unprecedented decision to give up his nation\u2019s atomic bombs, told me that he did so in the early 1990s because he was personally opposed to nuclear weapons; because the Soviet Union, whose aggression South Africa was trying to deter, was disintegrating; and because South Africa was trying to end its international isolation as part of its political transition away from apartheid. (While some speculate that the country\u2019s white leaders didn\u2019t want the incoming black government to possess nuclear weapons, de Klerk denied that this informed his actions.)
George Perkovich, a nuclear-weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has identified a similar dynamic at play in U. S.-Russian nuclear-arms reduction agreements over the years. \u201cWhen the political relationships changed and the types of war you were worried about being conducted changed \u2026 you could reduce nuclear weapons,\u201d he told me last fall.
6) It\u2019s possible this is the small start of something big.
Reflecting on the significance of the Singapore summit in an interview with the BBC, the former South Korean military officer I-B Chun quoted a Korean saying: \u201cA long journey starts with the first step. And when that first step is taken, the journey is half-finished.\u201d The journey to North Korea\u2019s denuclearization may be a long way from half-finished, and may never finish or even end abruptly at any moment, but Trump\u2019s meeting with Kim is certainly a first step in the right direction. And we simply don\u2019t know at this point where the next steps, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his North Korean counterparts will now take, will lead.
\u201cAs risky and high-stakes as this entire process is, it makes sense because that\u2019s the way the North operates. Their regime is top-down,\u201d the Korea expert Duyeon Kim noted when we met in Seoul ahead of the Trump-Kim summit. She advised Trump and Kim to settle in Singapore \u201cupon a very simple vision statement on end goals \u2026 and then have senior negotiators figure out the details, figure out timetables, figure out implementation.\u201d
That, in fact, is exactly what the two leaders did.<\/p>\n