One part John Bolton, another part a more fundamental US-North Korea dispute.<\/b>
\nA week ago, President Trump and Kim Jong Un said they\u2019d meet in Singapore on June 12 for a historic summit on North Korea\u2019s nuclear program. On Tuesday night, North Korea threatened to call the whole thing off.
The statement from North Korean Vice Minister Kim Kye Gwan blasted the Trump administration in over-the-top terms (\u201cridiculous comedy\u201d) and suggested the North might \u201cno longer be no longer be interested in… dialogue\u201d with the US.
The obvious question: Why is North Korea, which had been all sweetness and light for the past several months of negotiations, all of a sudden saying it might back out of the talks? And is this a serious threat, or just some kind of gambit to set the terms for the upcoming talks?
There\u2019s an unusually strong consensus among North Korea experts about the answer. They don\u2019t believe Pyongyang is trying to scuttle the talks, at least not yet. Instead, Kim may be trying to reset Trump\u2019s expectations and make him understand that North Korea isn\u2019t willing to hand over its nukes.
\u201cThis is all part of the negotiation,\u201d Abraham Denmark, the director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, says. \u201cThe Trump administration has laid out a maximal starting position \u2014 raising expectations of dramatic North Korean concessions for little in return. Now Kim has laid out his own position.\u201d
Now, it had long been clear that there was a divide between Trump and Kim over the goal of these talks. The reason this is being discussed now is because \u2014 and I\u2019m being serious about this \u2014 North Korean leaders watch American television.
More specifically, they watched uber-hawkish National Security Adviser John Bolton\u2019s appearances on two Sunday news talk shows this week, where he insisted on a complete dismantling of North Korea\u2019s nuclear program. Bolton\u2019s statements, paired with similar ones from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on a third Sunday show, alarmed the North Koreans \u2014 leading to this effort to make their negotiating position clearer.
\u201cAll parties had left definitions sufficiently vague to allow things to proceed, but Bolton\/Pompeo were on Sunday talk shows making very clear they were after [complete denuclearization],\u201d Mira Rapp-Hooper, a North Korea expert at Yale Law School, tells me. \u201cNorth Korea never signed up for that, and Kim doesn\u2019t want to look weak or submissive headed into the summit.\u201d
So Bolton, intentionally or not, has forced the two sides to confront the central problem with the upcoming negotiations: The US is demanding something North Korea has shown no sign of being willing to give. It\u2019s not clear if the president understands this dynamic, and if he doesn\u2019t get it, then the upcoming summit is set to crash and burn.
Perhaps the most striking thing about North Korea\u2019s statement, if you read the whole thing, is how laser-focused it was on Bolton and his comments. It takes particular offense at a comparison Bolton made in one of his TV spots between North Korea on the one hand, and Libya under Muammar Qaddafi on the other.
Up until 2003, Libya had an active nuclear weapons program, though it had not yet built a working device. That year, Libya came to an agreement with the Bush administration to hand over all the nuclear materials it possessed, including rudimentary plans for a device, and tell the US government where it had acquired the weapons. Bolton suggested that this is exactly what would be on offer for North Korea.
\u201cIt\u2019s up to the North Koreans to show us that they really do intend to give up nuclear weapons,\u201d he said . \u201cI think we\u2019re looking at the Libya model of 2003.\u201d
The national security adviser has said things like this before, even going so far as to endorse striking North Korea if they wouldn\u2019t hand over their nukes. But this time, Pyongyang was paying attention \u2014 and it explicitly singled out Bolton\u2019s comments as the reason for its threat to pull out of the Trump-Kim summit.
\u201cIt is absolutely absurd to dare compare the DPRK, a nuclear weapons state, to Libya, which had been in the initial state of nuclear development,\u201d the statement explains. \u201cWe shed light on the quality of Bolton already in the past, and we do not hide our feelings of repugnance toward him.\u201d
References to Libya rankle the North, in particular, because of what eventually happened to Qaddafi. Eight years after the denuclearization agreement, the US intervened in a Libyan civil war, siding with rebels against Qaddafi. US intervention proved decisive, and Qaddafi\u2019s regime was toppled \u2014 you can watch videos of rebels capturing and gruesomely torturing the deposed leader online before killing him. North Korea is very aware of this; it built its nuclear arsenal in large part to deter a US attack and avoid Qaddafi\u2019s fate.
The statement sends an extremely blunt message: North Korea will not go the way of Libya. If Trump listens to Bolton on what to ask, it seems likely that the talks could fail.
\u201cIf the Trump administration fails to recall the lessons of the past … owing to the likes of Bolton, and turns its ear to the advice of quasi-\u2018patriots\u2019 who insist on the Libya model,\u201d the North Koreans say, \u201cprospects of upcoming DPRK-US summit and overall DPRK-US relations will be crystal clear.\u201d
It\u2019s tempting to try to read North Korean statements in some kind of code, to try to figure out the hidden meaning behind the words on the page. Sometimes that\u2019s the right approach. But in this case, experts say, the North is simply laying out its negotiating position in the plainest terms possible \u2014 trying to make it extremely obvious to its negotiating partners what the red lines are.
\u201c[Kim] is making it clear that if Trump and company think he\u2019s going to show up at the summit ready to quickly hand over his treasured nuclear sword in return for nothing until that happens, they\u2019re dreaming,\u201d says Kingston Reif, a nuclear expert at the Arms Control Association.
If there is any kind of subtler goal, it\u2019s to try to empower the more moderate voices in the Trump administration: to tell the White House that Bolton isn\u2019t someone they can deal with, and that if the president wants to make a deal, he\u2019ll have to listen to others in the administration.
\u201cThey can very evenly tell [Trump] to take John Bolton\u2019s tongue out of his ear if he wants to get serious,\u201d says Joshua Pollack, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies.
Notably, the statement does not heap venom on Secretary of State Pompeo personally in the way that it does Bolton, despite Pompeo also suggesting on Sunday that America wants the North to denuclearize. In fact, there\u2019s even a favorable reference to the two trips Pompeo has already made to Pyongyang, suggesting they see him as someone they can deal with \u2014 unlike Bolton.
So while the threat to cancel the talks is at the top of all the headlines, the real story here isn\u2019t that the North Koreans want to walk away; it\u2019s that they\u2019re trying to tell Trump not to do something that might force them to.
The Trump administration\u2019s response to the North Korean statement has been mixed.
On the one hand, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders disavowed Bolton\u2019s \u201cLibya model\u201d comments, saying, \u201cI\u2019m not aware that that\u2019s a model that we\u2019re using.\u201d On the other hand, Trump himself told reporters that he was still insisting on complete nuclear disarmament, responding to North Korea\u2019s threat to withdraw with his patented \u201cwe\u2019ll see what happens\u201d line.
It\u2019s not actually clear, then, whether the Trump administration is getting the message North Korea is trying to put out \u2014 that they won\u2019t give up their nukes. And that\u2019s the problem.
Both sides had long agreed that the goal of talks was the \u201cdenuclearization\u201d of the Korean Peninsula. But they had radically different definitions as to what that means. Trump seemed to have in mind something that nuclear experts call CVID \u2014 complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization \u2014 and insisted they wouldn\u2019t make any concessions until North Korea started doing so. The North, by contrast, has always insisted that denuclearization would entail a kind of grand bargain in which the United States ends its alliance with South Korea.
Absent concessions on that level, which have never been on the table, what they want from the Americans is an acceptance of their nuclear weapons \u2014 the opposite of denuclearization.
\u201cWe knew North Korea wasn\u2019t going to give up nukes, and we knew a grand bargain-style deal would be problematic for Kim Jong Un,\u201d says Van Jackson, a scholar at Victoria University of Wellington. \u201cThe question was always how Kim was going to play it \u2014 what does North Korea say and do so that it can get prestige [and] sanctions relief, and still keep nukes?\u201d
So what was happening before this week was dangerous: two sides racing toward talks with completely different senses of what those talks could and should accomplish. Bolton\u2019s Sunday show comments have forced the issue: make it impossible for North Korea to ignore the yawning gulf between its position and the US\u2019s, and try to take some steps to solve it.
\u201cThis has been coming for a while \u2014 it\u2019s the reckoning over \u2018denuclearization\u2019,\u201d Rapp-Hooper says. \u201cThe only question was whether this would happen at the summit or before it.\u201d
So, ironically, this could end up being a good thing. If Sanders\u2019s walkback actually ends up representing the White House position, and the Trump team starts scaling down its ambitions, then maybe they can come to some kind of more moderate but still useful agreement \u2014 like agreeing to relax sanctions in exchange for North Korea giving up the ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States.
\u201cThe biggest risk heading into the summit has been that Trump, egged on by Bolton, has wildly unrealistic expectations about what can be achieved,\u201d Reif says. \u201cMy hope, and perhaps it is misplaced, is that North Korea\u2019s message last night will convince Trump and especially Pompeo, who have the most invested in a successful summit, to set more realistic expectations.\u201d
But there\u2019s always the chance they don\u2019t. In that case, the summit is destined to fail \u2014 or to collapse before it starts.
\u201cIt is certainly plausible that Kim may back out of the summit,\u201d says Denmark, the Wilson Center scholar. \u201cI expect he would prefer that Trump get the blame for actually killing it.\u201d
Alex Ward contributed reporting to this piece .<\/p>\n

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