If Kim Jong-un Keeps His Nuclear Arms, Can Trump Still Claim Victory?
By Motoko Rich
TOKYO — From the moment President Trump accepted an audacious invitation to meet Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, he raised expectations that he would finally do what none of his predecessors had: get North Korea to abandon its nuclear arsenal.
Yet as a warning last week from the North made clear — and as most experts on the country have long declared — Mr. Kim has no intention of giving up his nuclear weapons any time soon, if ever.
Now the question is how Mr. Trump will redefine success, if the summit meeting actually takes place as planned.
If Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim do sit down in a room in Singapore on June 12, it is clear that denuclearization is all but off the table in the short term. But analysts suggested Mr. Trump would have no trouble finding other ways to claim victory.
“The reality is that the summit will be a success because Trump will package, sell, and call it a success to his supporters,” said Duyeon Kim, a visiting senior fellow at the Korean Peninsula Future Forum in Seoul, the South Korean capital. “It unfortunately won’t matter what the experts think.”
In a sign that plans were still moving forward, the South’s president, Moon Jae-in, arrived in Washington for a meeting with Mr. Trump on Tuesday to discuss details of the upcoming talks.
Experts — many of whom have sharply criticized Mr. Trump’s improvisational approach to diplomacy and apparent lack of knowledge about the history of prior, and failed, deals with North Korea — said one realistic outcome could be a simple declaration stating that denuclearization is an eventual goal.
With the memory of North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests and Mr. Trump’s “fire and fury” rhetoric still fresh in most minds, analysts said even a vague deal could be more desirable than a return to the rising tensions of last year.
Coupled with a North Korean agreement to extend its moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests, and a promise not to export nuclear arms, analysts said such a deal would be an important starting point for future negotiations.
“That’s not what the president is promising or what everybody is hoping for, but it would be really good and they should take it,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a Korea expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “You’re not getting rid of the weapons, but putting yourself on the path where someday they might not be needed. Maybe not in Kim Jong-un’s lifetime, but it is still worth making that progress, especially because 2017 was really scary.”
Mr. Trump’s desire for a quick, tweetable triumph could leave room for professional diplomats and nuclear experts to hammer out a longer-term agreement with North Korean officials, some analysts say.
“He will come out and say ‘where is my peace prize?” said Suzanne DiMaggio, a director and senior fellow at the New America research group who has been involved in unofficial talks with North Korea. “He really just wants to emerge from the summit as saying ‘I got them to do what no other president could,’ and I think then he will probably lose interest.”
“The less President Trump is involved in that process,” Ms. DiMaggio said, “the better.”
A vague promise to denuclearize would likely disappoint many in Washington, where there are memories of the North Koreans reneging on deals before. It would also fall far short of the demands of hawks like John R. Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser, who has called for total and immediate denuclearization.
Some analysts said North Korea was also unlikely to be satisfied by vague proclamations. Mr. Kim is likely to demand a clear guarantee that the United States would never attack, as well as quick relief from international sanctions.
Mr. Trump has praised those sanctions for bringing Mr. Kim to the table in the first place. But even if Mr. Trump tries to hold firm on sanctions, analysts said, he may already have lost that leverage, as both South Korea and, more crucially, China have indicated that they are willing to lower the pressure on the North.
The North “will count on the fact that they have opened up a track with the Chinese and the Chinese are not in a favorable mind towards Trump right now,” said Christopher R. Hill, who negotiated with Pyongyang for several years during the George W. Bush administration. “There’s a problem with U.S.-Chinese relations that the North Koreans will seek to exploit in the coming months.”
Given the North’s negative reaction last week to South Korea’s joint military exercises with the United States, Mr. Kim may also use the talks with Mr. Trump to call for scaling back the number of American troops in South Korea. It would be a mistake to concede that right away, analysts said.
“If Trump puts significant sanctions relief or a rollback of U.S. military forces in the region on the table too soon, he may not have enough leverage to incentivize North Korea to take steps down the road to continue dismantling its nuclear program,” said Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association in Washington.
In his meeting with Mr. Trump on Tuesday, Mr. Moon of South Korea may also push again for signing a peace treaty with North Korea to formally end the Korean War after more than 60 years.
Such a deal could be appealing for Mr. Trump, because it would give him a clear opportunity to declare a success that no other president has achieved.
Yet even that could compromise the security of American allies if a deal were signed without negotiating a drawdown of North Korea’s conventional weapons, particularly the thousands of artillery pieces it has pointed at the South, and its short- and medium-range missiles that can reach Japan.
“If you just sign a treaty because it sounds Nobel Peace Prize-worthy, but you don’t address the threat, then you’ve created a more dangerous situation,” said Bruce Klingner, a specialist in Korean and Japanese affairs at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
“Signing a peace treaty that triggers a reduction of U.S. forces on the peninsula without getting anything in return from the North on nuclear or even conventional artillery aimed at Seoul or missiles aimed at Tokyo” would be a “disastrous success,” Mr. Klingner said.
Yet given the intensity of Mr. Trump’s threats last year — and Mr. Bolton’s continued warnings that the administration is prepared to use military action if talks fail — longtime North Korea watchers suggested that Pyongyang would be restrained while Mr. Trump is in office.
“As long as Trump remains in the White House and a threat of a military attack looms, North Koreans will probably keep their part of the bargain,” said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Kookmin University in Seoul.
But make no mistake, Mr. Lankov said: The North will make “a lot of declarations about eventual surrender of nuclear weapons, but these will just be empty promises without the slightest intention to carry them through.”
Even some critics of the Trump administration said that any deal emerging from the talks would be better than nothing.
“The way the administration was talking a month ago, it was like all of a sudden there was going to be a fairy tale ending,” said Victor Cha, an expert on North Korea whose nomination to be ambassador to South Korea was scotched after he criticized the Trump administration’s North Korea policy. “But we all know there are no fairy tale endings when it comes to North Korea.”
“This is going to be long, hard, and Trump is going to have to roll up his sleeves,” Mr. Cha said. “Even if it is a repeat of previous negotiations, do we really have a choice?”
Follow Motoko Rich on Twitter: @MotokoRich.
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