North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s decision to sit down with the U. S. was fueled by his regime’s view that it made significant achievements in its nuclear weapons program and would no longer be a “supplicant” in talks, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s decision to sit down with the U. S. was fueled by his regime’s view that it made significant achievements in its nuclear weapons program and would no longer be a “supplicant” in talks, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said.
Clapper said it may not matter whether North Korea actually has the technology to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead that can successfully hit a U. S. target. That’s less important to the regime than the psychological boost it received from demonstrating its prowess in testing ICBMs and more powerful nuclear bombs.
“They achieved what they think they need to achieve a deterrent,” Clapper, a Barack Obama appointee and frequent Trump critic, told Bloomberg reporters and editors in Washington on Monday. “It’s certainly not like what we would do in terms of testing and validating a weapons system.”
But, he added, “whatever it is, they now are confident enough so that they can go to the negotiating table and not show up as a supplicant, which has always been the case.”
Clapper, who visited North Korea for talks while serving in the Obama administration, said he supports Trump’s decision to meet face-to-face with Kim in Singapore next week. Yet he called the summit a “huge concession” to the regime in its effort to seek legitimacy.
He said he argued during the Obama administration for the two nations to open offices known as “interest sections” in each others’ capitals to facilitate communication and address crisis situations. Such a channel proved useful in U. S.-Cuban ties without requiring each country to have formal diplomatic relations, he added.
The Singapore summit on June 12 will be the first time the leaders of the U. S. and North Korea have met, more than six decades after an armistice ending hostilities in the Korean war went into effect. While neither side has publicly defined what might be achieved at the historic summit, Clapper said progress toward a formal peace agreement would help ease tensions.
