Donald Trump is navigating a new nuclear era\u2014and fashioning a new approach.<\/b>
\n\u201cRemind me of Secretary Kerry\u2019s visit to Tehran, or the time that Obama met with\u201d Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, John Delury, a Korea expert at Yonsei University, challenged me when we got together in Seoul in May. I couldn\u2019t, because those things never happened. And that was precisely Delury\u2019s point.
What Donald Trump is doing with North Korea is in fact \u201cbolder\u201d than what Barack Obama did with Iran, he argued. Delury disagreed with Trump\u2019s decision to withdraw the U. S. from the nuclear agreement with Iran, and acknowledged that America\u2019s relations with Iran are even more toxic than its relations with North Korea because Washington and Tehran are on opposing sides of conflicts across the Middle East. Still, he maintained that Obama\u2019s \u201ccomplicated, technical\u201d deal may have been \u201ctoo focused\u201d on constraining Iran\u2019s nuclear capabilities. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a deep political settlement,\u201d he explained, whereas \u201cwhat I see Trump working on with Kim Jong Un is \u2026 a fundamental transformation of the relationship.\u201d
And what Trump is facing is nothing less than a new nuclear age, when the strategies that kept the world safe during the Cold War may no longer apply. In the words of James Holmes of the U. S. Naval War College, \u201cthere are more nuclear-weapon states\u201d now than during the Cold War, \u201cthey\u2019re of different shapes and sizes, and they\u2019re on different trajectories.\u201d If the fundamental question now is the same as it was during the Cold War\u2014how do you keep the world\u2019s deadliest weapons from destroying the world?\u2014the context is entirely different, and maybe that means the approach must be as well.
\u201cI think Trump gets it,\u201d Delury told me. Fundamental transformation is \u201cthe way to get progress with North Korea.\u2026 We have so trained ourselves to\u2026 treat North Korea as a question of missile and nuclear capabilities. We\u2019re almost Pavlovian at this point: They launch a missile and we salivate. That\u2019s all we understand the problem to be.\u201d But the problem is decades of hostility deeper than that.
As Trump himself has said of his nuclear summit this week in Singapore with Kim Jong Un: \u201cWe\u2019re going to get to know a lot of people that our country never got to know.\u2026 There\u2019s been a lot of\u2026 hatred between countries.\u2026 At a minimum, we\u2019ll start with, perhaps, a good relationship. And that\u2019s something that\u2019s very important toward the ultimate making of a deal.\u201d
Trump has executed a head-spinning shift in recent months, going from threatening North Korea with total destruction and the harshest sanctions in history, to courting the North with visions of economic partnership and future visits by Kim Jong Un to the White House. He withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran while simultaneously seeking a nuclear deal with North Korea. All this may seem like inexplicable moves by a volatile president intent on demonstrating that he\u2019s a better dealmaker than his predecessors. And maybe, to a considerable extent, that\u2019s what they are.
But in a broader sense, the moves are quite explicable. Trump, just like many other policymakers these days, is casting about for a solution to a problem that has grown more vexing over the course of what some scholars refer to as the \u201csecond nuclear age.\u201d And he doesn\u2019t appear to have made up his mind yet about the best way to navigate it. \u201cMaximum pressure [against North Korea] is absolutely in effect,\u201d he said ahead of the Singapore summit. \u201cWe don\u2019t use the term anymore because we\u2019re going into a friendly negotiation. Perhaps after that negotiation I will be using it again.\u201d
Though there may be more nuclear-weapons states now than during the Cold War, there are far fewer nuclear weapons in the world today, Holmes noted. At the same time, however, the \u201cgeometry\u201d of nuclear deterrence is \u201cfar more complex and harder to manage\u201d because the \u201csymmetrical\u201d arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the bipolar deterrence that undergirded it, is no longer the central dynamic. Hence why H. R. McMaster, Trump\u2019s former national-security adviser, once declared that if North Korea were to become a full-fledged nuclear power\u2014with the capacity to launch nuclear missiles anywhere in the world, share nuclear weapons and technology with other states and non-state actors, and scare neighbors into obtaining nukes of their own\u2014it \u201cwould be the most destabilizing development… in the post-World War II period.\u201d
In the case of the North Korea summit, \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 Holmes told me. \u201cPolitics leads, international law lags. We appear to be about to put this idea to the test.\u201d
Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, is less confident than Delury that Trump \u201cgets it\u201d at a strategic level. In becoming the first American president to meet the leader of North Korea, Lewis argued, Trump is simply being \u201ctransactional.\u2026 He wants the photo just as badly as Kim Jong Un. He wants the foreign-policy win.\u201d
But Lewis added that the far-reaching deal the Trump administration appears to be contemplating may be fitting for the new nuclear era. Coercive tools for stopping the spread of nuclear weapons aren\u2019t nearly as powerful now as they once were. The more promising tools, he said, \u201care persuasive in nature.\u201d And maybe they look something like the options the Trump administration has floated ahead of the Singapore summit\u2014transformative political, security, and economic concessions such as a formal declaration to end the Korean War; a flood of American investment; and eventually a peace treaty and the normalization of diplomatic relations with North Korea in exchange for North Korea dismantling its nuclear-weapons program.
When it comes to efforts to control and curb the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Lewis argues, the \u201ccoercion era\u201d is ending. We\u2019re now in the \u201casking nicely\u201d era. And Donald Trump, in Singapore, for a day at least, will essentially be asking nicely.
In the 1970s and \u201980s, economic sanctions and national laws prohibiting the export of nuclear-related technologies were effective because most countries didn\u2019t have a sufficient industrial and technological base to build nuclear arsenals on their own, Lewis said. But they\u2019re far less so today, when nuclear technologies are \u201carchaic\u201d and it therefore isn\u2019t as difficult for aspiring nuclear states to develop native programs. (\u201cNorth Korea is not the world\u2019s great industrial power,\u201d he noted.) And since the barriers to entering the nuclear club are now lower, it\u2019s also less credible for the United States to threaten war with every country capable of clearing the hurdle. Is the U. S., already traumatized by two long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, really going to invade both Iran and North Korea to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons? Lewis asked.
U. S. officials may argue that it was Trump\u2019s sanctions and talk of military action that forced Kim Jong Un to negotiate, but Lewis believes it was Kim Jong Un\u2019s declared completion of his nuclear program last fall that proved decisive. As Lewis sees it, it was the failure of Trump\u2019s \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d campaign against North Korea, not the campaign\u2019s success, that has motivated the president to pivot to the polar opposite approach: a campaign of maximum engagement with Kim.
The Obama administration tended to credit sanctions with paving the way for the Iran deal, but Lewis thinks the agreement was really a product of the administration dropping a number of demands and asking nicely: The United States, for example, let Iran keep certain nuclear facilities and continue engaging in some limited enrichment activities. The deal basically \u201ckeeps this country that we have problems with from getting a nuclear weapon for a while\u2014and that gives us time to solve these other problems [in the relationship], but it doesn\u2019t fix them,\u201d Lewis said. As Philip Gordon, a former Middle East adviser to Obama, has noted, part of the administration\u2019s theory in thinking about the pact\u2019s 10- and 15-year restrictions on elements of Iran\u2019s nuclear program was that the \u201copenness and engagement\u201d brought about by the agreement would create \u201cconstituencies for cooperation\u201d that might one day inspire a new generation of Iranian leaders to be less confrontational toward the United States. \u201cYou don\u2019t make deals like this with your friends,\u201d Obama observed, in announcing the deal.
Trump, by contrast, seems to be toying with the idea of striking up a friendship and then making a deal, to see if that yields something stronger than what Obama got with Iran. If he were to do so, said Jim Walsh of MIT\u2019s Security Studies Program, Trump would be breaking with the longstanding U. S. demand that North Korea change its behavior in order to have a better relationship with the United States. Instead, he would be moving toward North Korea\u2019s longtime position: \u201cLet\u2019s have a better relationship, and then we\u2019ll change our behavior.\u201d
Walsh believes that with nuclear proliferation, politics is king. \u201cWhen it comes to nuclear weapons … the engineering is harder than the science. The program management is harder than the engineering, and the politics is harder than the program management. The states that succeed at nuclear weapons are states that make [the program] a political priority,\u201d he said at a conference I attended at Harvard\u2019s Nieman Foundation in March. And he thinks the same is true for stopping the development and spread of nuclear weapons.
\u201cIf the Trump summit and process results in a political commitment by both sides that they stick to, then in some ways the tiny details [of verification] don\u2019t really matter,\u201d Walsh told me. \u201cThe technical stuff doesn\u2019t matter if you don\u2019t have the political commitment. And if you have the political commitment, [the technical stuff] is less important.\u201d Too often, he said, \u201cWe invert the pyramid and put what\u2019s least important up top and what\u2019s most important on the bottom.\u2026 When do these agreements survive? The Iran case is Exhibit A. [The key question] is whether they are politically sustainable.\u201d
But the summit is only a one-day affair, and it will take much longer than that to forge a new relationship between the United States and North Korea. Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un may well reach some kind of political pact in Singapore. Whether it endures much beyond Singapore is up to the moves of two famously unpredictable men.<\/p>\n

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