There’s a simple way to judge the Trump-Kim summit: hold any agreement to the standard the president set in criticizing the Iran deal.
While President Donald Trump prepares for his planned June 12 summit with Kim Jong Un, questions abound about the historic talks. When it comes to North Korea’s nuclear program, what is really on the table? What’s the United States willing to give up in return? And, most crucially, what would a successful deal with North Korea look like?
On that last question, responses vary. It’s easy to get swept up in the historic nature of major diplomatic negotiations, and to label them a success by the mere fact of their existence. But if you really want to know if the North Korea talks are successful, there’s a simple way to judge them: Hold President Trump to the standard he set in criticizing the Iran nuclear agreement.
As the lead U. S. negotiator in those talks, I was part of an effort to ensure and verify that Iran would never obtain a nuclear weapon.
It’s true that, as Trump has said, the Iran deal didn’t cover all of the problems the United States and other nations had with Iran. But if that’s the standard, then if a deal is struck with North Korea that covers only its nuclear weapons and the intercontinental ballistic missiles that could carry them to the U. S.—and leaves North Korea’s myriad other problems unsolved—Trump will have failed by his own metric.
Consider the arguments President Trump made in condemning the Iran deal.
“The Iranian dictatorship’s aggression continues to this day,” Trump said on October 13,2017. “The regime remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.… It develops, deploys and proliferates missiles that threaten American troops and our allies. It harasses American ships and threatens freedom of navigation in the Arabian Gulf and in the Red Sea. It imprisons Americans on false charges. And it launches cyberattacks against our critical infrastructure, financial system and military.”
According to the president’s Iran logic, North Korea must be forced to dismantle its shorter-range missiles that can reach Japan, as well as its forward-deployed conventional military that threatens South Korea—just as Trump criticized Iran’s “missiles and weapons that threaten its neighbors.
