If Trump can get a deal, it would trade nuclear concessions for sanctions relief. Sound familiar?
President Trump says he wants to strike a nuclear deal with North Korea that would benefit “the whole world” by neutralizing a looming threat, and he is willing to trade economic concessions to help make it happen.
That sounds a lot like the bargain President Barack Obama made with Iran in the international nuclear deal that Trump ripped up earlier this month.
Trump has cast the Obama administration’s efforts as the work of overeager and naive negotiators who got fleeced by Tehran, while he will bring a master dealmaker’s approach to his talks with Pyongyang. The result, he says, will be a great deal or a return to the “maximum pressure” approach he took toward Kim Jong Un at the start of his presidency.
“I think it’s going to be a very big success,” the president said during a May 10 campaign rally in Indiana. “But my attitude is: And if it isn’t, it isn’t. Okay? If it isn’t, it isn’t.”
Trump’s divergent views of the two nuclear negotiations, despite their similarities, underscore two of the main drivers of his foreign policy approach — a desire to tear down what Obama put in place and his belief that he can tackle the intractable problems that his predecessors failed to resolve.
[ Trump offers reassurance that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un would remain in power under nuclear deal]
So far, Trump has revealed little about the specifics of what he wants out of his meeting next month with Kim beyond getting North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. He has suggested he would like to strike an accord with Kim that would serve as the framework for more detailed negotiations. The Trump administration has given no estimate for how long the negotiation might take.
However long the bargaining lasts, the boundaries of a North Korea deal and the basic playbook to get that deal would roughly mirror the Iran pact, diplomats and analysts said. The essential trade-off of weapons or potential weapons for economic and other incentives is a diplomatic staple that long predates Trump.
“The Iran nuclear talks were extraordinarily complex and difficult,” spanning 10 years and two administrations from the start of the sanctions pressure campaign to a deal, said former senior State Department official R. Nicholas Burns. “The North Korea case is even more challenging because, unlike Iran, the regime has nuclear weapons and will not want to give them up at all costs. The North Koreans will be frustrating and tendentious and the deal the U. S. likely desires is roughly equivalent to the Iran deal Trump just disavowed.
