Nothing Found

No one yet knows what deals US President Donald Trump may have struck with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their private two-hour meeting in Helsinki. But it is already clear that Trump’s self-congratulations for striking a deal to ‘denuclearize’ the Korean peninsula during his Singapore summit with Kim Jong-un are ringing hollow. In addition to backsliding in its working-level negotiations with the United States, the Kim regime has continued to solidify its position as a nuclear-weapons state. The master of the Kremlin is sure to have taken note of this.

North Korea specialists have long been skeptical that Kim would ever give up his nuclear arsenal, and recent evidence supports their judgement. Reports citing US intelligence officials indicate that the North is pressing ahead with its nuclear-weapons program, by ramping up missile and enriched-uranium production and concealing the size of its nuclear inventory.

Anyone who has followed affairs on the Korean peninsula has seen this movie before. After all, Kim’s father and grandfather wrote the script decades ago. Since the 1970s, the Kims’ regime has repeatedly expressed its desire for a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, signed non-proliferation agreements, and negotiated with the US and South Korea—all while pursuing its nuclear-weapons program. In this latest rerun, Kim has even reused his father’s special effects. In May, he blew up a nuclear test site with the same cinematic flair that Kim Jong-il displayed when he dynamited a nuclear reactor’s cooling tower 10 years ago.

Compared to Kim’s well-rehearsed theatrics, the Trump administration’s performance has been a flop. After threatening North Korea with total destruction last year, Trump made a major concession to Kim by agreeing to attend the summit in June. While there, he demonstrated that neither he nor his administration had a strategy for getting Kim to make good on any deal. Making matters worse, Trump has continued to insist that follow-up talks with the North are ‘going well’, even though US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s last visit to Pyongyang ended with a round of mutual recrimination.

Behind the crumbling façade of Trump’s misrepresentations is an administration that remains divided on its primary policy goals. In light of the intelligence community’s latest assessment about the North’s continued enrichment activities, those divisions are likely to have deepened. For his part, Pompeo has already backpedaled on earlier US demands, by softening his language on the fraught issue of inspections and verification. And US officials have hinted that a further softening in the administration’s position is on the way.

Meanwhile, other White House officials have taken a harder line. Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, has called for not only denuclearisation, but also rapid disarmament of all of North Korea’s unconventional weapons. This month, Bolton even claimed to have a plan for dismantling all of North Korea’s nuclear-, chemical- and biological-weapons programs within a year.

Trump prefers top-down decision-making, so it remains to be seen how he will respond to intelligence reports about the North’s duplicity. At any rate, now that the US has shared its —intelligence with Japan, South Korea and other allies, political leaders and military officials in those countries have reason to be anxious. For Japan and South Korea, in particular, the contradictions between Trump’s rhetoric and his own intelligence services’ findings are becoming a source of serious concern.

Equally worrying is Trump’s unpredictable behaviour towards US allies. Officials in Tokyo and Seoul closely followed Trump’s blustering appearance at a NATO meeting this month, because they, too, have been on the receiving end of his attacks over military spending. Trump has pushed both governments to boost their military budgets, and he has long mused about withdrawing US forces from South Korea. At the Singapore summit, he even agreed to suspend US military exercises with South Korea—another major concession to the North—further unsettling America’s Asian allies.

Trump’s silence on the latest North Korea intelligence—to say nothing of his siding with Putin over his own intelligence agencies on charges of Russian meddling in the 2016 US election—will further deepen allies’ anxieties. Ignoring North Korea’s deceptions directly undermines the security of Japan and South Korea. Though the Kim regime is still working towards nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of reaching the continental US, it already has fully operational medium-range missiles that can strike its neighbours. And, because Japan and South Korea both host US military bases, they are at the top of the North’s nuclear target list.

Trump may not like it, but he must call out Kim’s duplicity, especially given the latest intelligence. Among other things, the North is accelerating production of solid-fuel rocket engines and an ICBM-armed submarine. Both technologies would bolster the North’s ability to launch a surprise attack, by making its nuclear arsenal more durable, mobile and easily concealed. The Kim regime’s ongoing efforts in this area make clear that it has no intention of scrapping its nuclear program.

White House officials are now suggesting that Trump could use the United Nations General Assembly meeting in September to hold another meeting with Kim, as if rekindling the two leaders’ ‘bromance’ will lead to serious negotiations. It won’t. Instead, Trump needs to put substance before spectacle, above all by confronting Kim with the latest intelligence findings. Platitudes about denuclearisation are one thing; serious arms-control efforts to reduce the risks on the Korean peninsula are quite another. The Trump administration must think very carefully about its next steps.

Back in 2005, when I was the United States’ lead negotiator at the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program, I looked at the instructions I received for my first meeting, a Chinese-hosted banquet that included a North Korean delegation. If there was any toasting (not unheard of at Chinese banquets), I was not to join in. Apparently, I was expected to sit there, without touching my glass, glowering with arms folded until everyone else had placed theirs back on the table. Later, when I visited North Korea for the first time, I was instructed not to smile at my hosts. Apparently, I was expected to offer only angry stares.

Donald Trump has obviously modified those instructions. In fact, with his unending praise of Kim Jong-un’s leadership, his clumsy, impromptu salute of one of Kim’s generals, and his endorsement of all things North Korean (especially the potential for beachfront property development), Trump has all but abandoned any pretence that the US promotes a broader set of values. But while Trump may have overshot the mark, the idea that the US delegation should sit with glasses untouched during a toast also strikes the wrong tone.

In September 1995, during the final month of the Bosnian War, the US delegation to peace negotiations, led by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, arrived in Belgrade for talks with Serbia’s dictator, Slobodan Milošević. According to Milošević, he could not compel the Bosnian Serbs to withdraw their heavy weapons and lift the bloody four-year siege of Sarajevo. He asked Holbrooke to meet with the Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, both of whom were later convicted of committing war crimes. Holbrooke asked where they were. ‘Over there in that villa’, Milošević replied. ‘Can I call for them?’

Holbrooke hastily brought our delegation together for a quick parley. ‘Should we meet them?’ he asked me. ‘And if we do, should I shake their hands?’ Thinking about the hundreds of thousands of Sarajevans—the many who had been murdered and those facing starvation as a result of the continuing siege—I replied, ‘Shake their hands and let’s get this over with and go home.’ We did. The siege of Sarajevo was lifted the next day.

Whether shaking a hand helps or not, negotiating while shaking a fist has little record of success. During this year’s Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, Vice President Mike Pence was scheduled to meet with the North Korean delegation. Perhaps to cover his back at home, Pence delivered what were then the usual tough-sounding talking points before the meeting. The North Koreans promptly cancelled, as if to ask, What would be the point?

During the period I dealt with the six-party talks, I avoided adding my voice to the anti-North Korean invective. I knew that soon—often every other week—I would have to meet them again, and while a display of moxie might help me in Washington, it would not help at the tip of the spear, where it was my job to negotiate away the North Koreans’ nuclear ambitions. There is a big difference between talking tough on television talk shows and sitting across from the North Koreans. Direct diplomacy is a serious means to a serious end. Posturing from a distance is not part of it.

Sometimes body language is hard to get right. As US ambassador to Iraq, the instructions I received from Washington rarely came with any commensurate sense of responsibility for the outcome. I was told that my job included helping the Iraqi opposition rid themselves of then-Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. US officials revelled in their amped-up toughness in Washington meeting rooms, like high school athletes banging on the lockers before a big game. But when they actually came out on the field and met with Maliki, they gave him no reason to believe they wanted anything but the best for him.

I would sit in such meetings watching Maliki glance over at me, wondering why I had previously warned him of diminishing US government patience with his autocratic rule and dire consequences. Meanwhile, the visitors from Washington made points that were so subtle and nuanced that Maliki would have needed a decoding device to comprehend their real meaning.

Any diplomat must be purposeful in a negotiation on behalf of his or her country, which means being clear-eyed about the desired outcome and the best way to achieve it. In Singapore, the issue was the North Korean nuclear weapons program. Nothing else really mattered.

Time will tell whether the North Koreans reciprocate Trump’s professed affection for them. Kim gave away little, and was probably stunned when, for the first time ever, a US president accepted at face value North Korea’s supposed anxiety about US joint military exercises with South Korea (which the North Koreans know to be defensive in purpose). That was too large a concession, and, one way or another, it will have to be taken back. More broadly, a framework for peace and security that includes all the directly affected parties—South Korea, Japan, Russia and China—will need to be designed.

Similarly, North Korea’s human rights record, one of the world’s worst, will have to be taken up in the future—perhaps, as I signalled during the six-party talks, as a component of eventual diplomatic relations. But, for now, the North Korean nuclear program must be at the top of any negotiating agenda.

Whether Trump’s approach actually works with North Korea will depend on the diplomacy that follows the Singapore summit. Over to you, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

US President Donald Trump returned from his short summit meeting in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in an exultant mood. ‘Everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office’, Trump tweeted. ‘There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.’ He subsequently told reporters, ‘I have solved that problem.’

There is only one catch: what Trump claimed was untrue. The nuclear threat posed by North Korea remains undiminished. The joint statement issued by the two leaders was as brief—just 391 words—as it was vague.

The statement was far more about aspirations than accomplishments. North Korea committed only ‘to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula’. Missing was any definition of what denuclearisation might entail, a timeline for implementation, or a reference to how any actions would be verified. Other issues related to nuclear weapons, including ballistic missiles, were not even mentioned. Thus far, at least, the agreement with North Korea compares unfavorably to the Iran nuclear deal that Trump denounced—and then renounced a month before meeting Kim.

This is not to argue that the Singapore summit had no value. At least for now, bilateral relations are in a better place than they were a year ago, when North Korea was conducting nuclear and missile tests, and observers (including me) were busy calculating the chances that the two countries would be making war rather than peace. And, looking forward, there is, in principle, the possibility that the United States and North Korea will be able to reach agreement on the many relevant issues and details that the Singapore summit statement left out.

But turning this possibility into reality will be extraordinarily difficult. There are many reasons to doubt whether North Korea will ever give up weaponry that, more than anything else, explains America’s willingness to take it seriously and treat it as something of an equal. In addition, the experience of Ukraine, a country that gave up its nuclear weapons, only to see the world do nothing when Russia annexed Crimea, hardly provides a reason for Kim Jong-un to follow suit. Much the same could be said of Libya, given Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s fate.

There is also good reason to doubt that North Korea, arguably the world’s most closed and secretive country, would ever permit the sort of intrusive international inspections that would be required to verify that it had complied with undertakings spelled out in some future pact.

Trump seems to think that Kim can be swayed not simply by threats and pressure, but by flattery and promises as well. The White House released a four-minute video that showcased Kim as someone who could be a great historical figure if only he would fundamentally change. The video also went to great lengths to show what North Korea could gain economically were it to meet US demands. The president even spoke of the North’s potential as a venue for real-estate development and tourism.

What seems not to have occurred to Trump is that such a future holds more peril than promise to someone whose family has ruled with an iron grip for three generations. A North Korea open to Western businesspeople might soon find itself penetrated by Western ideas. Popular unrest would be sure to follow.

Trump emphasises the importance of personal relationships, and he claimed to have developed one with Kim in a matter of hours. More than once, he spoke of the trust he had for a leader with a record of killing off those (including an uncle and a brother) he deemed his enemies. All of this turned Ronald Reagan’s maxim—‘trust, but verify’—on its head, to something like ‘Don’t verify, but trust.’

In fact, some of Trump’s post-summit remarks have actually weakened the prospect of achieving his goals. His depiction of the summit as a great success that solved the nuclear problem will make it that much tougher to maintain international support for the economic sanctions that are still needed to pressure North Korea. Trump also did himself no favour by unilaterally announcing that the US would no longer conduct what he described as ‘provocative’ war games, also known as military exercises meant to ensure readiness and enhance deterrence. In so doing, he not only alarmed several US allies, but also gave away what he could have traded for something from North Korea.

The danger, of course, is that subsequent negotiations will fail, for all these reasons, to bring about the complete and verifiable denuclearisation of North Korea that the US has said must happen soon. Trump would likely then accuse Kim of betraying his trust.

In that case, the US would have three options. It could accept less than full denuclearisation, an outcome that Trump and his top aides have said they would reject. It could impose even stricter sanctions, to which China and Russia are unlikely to sign up. Or it could reintroduce the threat of military force, which South Korea, in particular, would resist.

But if Trump concludes that diplomacy has failed, he could nonetheless opt for military action, a course John Bolton suggested just before becoming national security adviser. This would hardly be the legacy that Trump intended for the Singapore summit, but it remains more possible than his optimistic tweets would lead one to believe.

Advances in science made the Trump–Kim Summit possible. North Korean scientists’ achievements with nuclear bombs and intercontinental missiles played a part, but the unsung scientific masters were the Singaporeans. They seem to have perfected a high-power ego containment device that enabled Donald Trump and Kim Jong‑un to be in close proximity without an explosion or fusion event.

That proximity allowed a familiar thing in history to occur: two Great Men looked into each other’s steely eyes and come to an understanding. Or at least think they have. I witnessed this phenomenon many times when in government service.

A senior official would be visiting a difficult international counterpart with whom we had strongly differing interests. The official would be briefed in advance and would seem to have a very clear view of the issues at stake and the behaviour of the individuals on the other side. On return, we’d debrief the official, and often find that the Great Man phenomenon had occurred—despite evidence to the contrary, the returning official would describe the other person as ‘someone we can do business with’. ‘He and I understand each other,’ he’d say and, my favourite, ‘I trust him.’

It usually took several months and examples of the behaviour they had been briefed about earlier to recur before the starry-eyed bromance ended. It was a study in interests mattering more than personality.

Which brings me to the summit. Great news that the North Korean and US leaders are talking rather than exchanging missile salvoes. Great news that more meetings are planned. Not so great news that Kim Jong‑un has managed to do nothing new, but instead has ‘reaffirmed’ that North Korea ‘commits to work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula’.

In diplomacy, ‘reaffirming’ is a deliberate word that states that no new concession or statement is made. It’s a formal way of just repeating yourself. And any parent knows that ‘committing to working towards’ cleaning their room is their adolescent child’s way of saying that it ain’t going to happen.

But the most important thing about the summit was what it revealed to US allies and partners about how President Trump’s long-held views on alliances are informing his negotiations with North Korea. His America First philosophy is starting to be a program of work. Giving Kim the gift—without any reciprocity from Kim—of ending ‘war games’ with the United States’ South Korean ally could be seen as establishing Washington’s good faith early.

The way Trump talked about it, though, shows the deeper problem: the first reason for doing this that came to Trump’s lips in his hour-long press conference was that joint US–South Korean exercises cost ‘a tremendous amount of money’, so not doing them would save Washington a lot of cash. It also appears that Trump hadn’t foreshadowed this gift with the South Koreans before announcing it to the waiting world.

It’s America First, with this not being an isolationist America as some feared, but arguably something worse: a unilateralist US that makes narrowly based decisions that are in its immediate transactional interests, without care for the interests of close allies, and without regard for the consequences for American power and influence that are exerted through its global security partnerships.

This is a path for making America small again because it misses what has made America the successful global superpower—the multiplier effect of its partnerships and alliances. That’s cheap at twice the price, if security, influence and prosperity are your goals.

This matters because a unilateralist conception of America in the world is likely to result in much bigger security issues being unwittingly or deliberately thrown under the bus as Trump lurches from one summit ‘success’ to another.

It’s not hard to imagine Trump triumphantly announcing that he and Kim have agreed to North Korea dismantling its ICBMs in exchange for Trump removing the protection of the US nuclear umbrella from South Korea to give Kim the security guarantee he wants. It’s even easier to imagine Trump announcing the withdrawal of the 32,000 US military personnel stationed in South Korea in exchange for a move from Kim. (Trump mentioned in his press conference he wants to bring them home, presumably to save that cash again.) Both steps would fit with the Trumpian America First program, but done in a unilateral way, both would undercut its security role in Asia.

Shinzō Abe must be thinking hard about how he further reinforces the idea that if Trump were to agree to end US provision of extended deterrence to South Korea, that would sow great doubt in the minds of Japan’s leaders about the value to Japan of US security guarantees and extended nuclear deterrence. The problem is that Abe will already have stressed this, but may have no confidence that Trump, even if he understands, cares much about it.

Two last points about the summit and the future.

First, of the two Great Men who looked into each other’s eyes, one will be in power for life (however long or short that is) and one will be in power for another two to six years. Kim knows that any Great Man agreement he reaches with Trump has to outlast Trump. He knows the Iran deal turned out not to outlast Obama, and he knows that the US is divided already over the deal that Trump may strike with him.

Kim has been groomed to lead North Korea against the international community, and that the possession of credible nuclear weapons and missiles that can deliver them sat at the pinnacle of his grandfather’s and father’s ambitions for the North Korean state. He understands showmanship and seems to understand how to feed the Trump ego to his advantage.

Unlike Trump’s allies and partners at the G7, he doesn’t want to plead with Trump. He wants Trump to recognise his strength and give him concessions. He is willing for Trump to look good as he does so. Slow rolling deals while extracting what he needs still seems to be his plan.

Second, US–North Korean leaders’ meetings are great—not enough to resolve the competing strategic and security interests that flow through the Korean peninsula, but bigger than whether the peninsula does or doesn’t denuclearise.

That’s why the previous six-party talks existed—because Japan, South Korea, China and even Russia have dogs in this fight. Trump is unable to represent his allies’ interests effectively, mainly because he doesn’t share them. And neither Xi Jinping nor Vladimir Putin can be happy to engage in secondhand shuttle diplomacy with Kim or Trump.

This means we need to look to Singapore for another scientific breakthrough: an interests-coupling device that allows the strategic interests of those other powers to be brought within the ego containment field that has done its work so well this week. That breakthrough seems some way off.

With the location and date of the forthcoming summit between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong‑un now fixed, speculation has turned to what sort of agreement might be achievable. US National Security Advisor John Bolton recently suggested that the ‘Libyan model’ of nuclear disarmament—from 2003–2004—might offer a framework that could be applied to North Korea in 2018.

The suggestion received what might kindly be called a mixed reception, not least because the North Koreans believe that Muammar al-Qaddafi was a fool to abandon his nuclear program. Still, I’d like to explore the Libyan case here because it offers one of the few examples of ‘denuclearisation’ that we have.

True, the two cases are markedly dissimilar: Libya, unlike North Korea, had made relatively little progress towards nuclear weapons when its leadership took the strategic decision to abandon the program. The Libyans had no nuclear weapons. Yes, they had a small number of centrifuges—some still in their original packing—and a quantity of uranium hexafluoride (the feedstock for a centrifuge enrichment cascade).

More ominously, they had a nuclear weapon design, apparently obtained from the A.Q. Khan network—although some Libyans claimed that the design was a ‘bonus’ intended as a reward for their other purchases.

But when US officials appeared before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early 2004 to talk about the disarmament effort, senators were at least as interested in the detailed picture of the nuclear black market that the Libyan program revealed as they were in the program itself. While a raft of fascinating material about the program had suddenly spilled forth, it was the procurement trail, stretching from Libya to Pakistan and Malaysia, that the committee chairman, Senator Richard Lugar, referred to as ‘the treasure trove’.

While North Korea’s current indigenous capabilities are far stronger than Libya’s were 15 years ago, one suspects there would be similar interest in Washington today about Pyongyang’s proliferation links.

Further, there are some aspects of the Libyan model that the current US administration might want to replicate in any deal with North Korea. Two of those aspects concern access and relocation. US and British experts were given extraordinary access to the Libyan weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. See the statements made in 2004 by Paula DeSutter, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance, to two congressional committees (here and here) and, separately, in an interview with Arms Control Today:

The Libyans said, ‘We are no longer going to have a nuclear weapons program.’ They invited the United States and the United Kingdom in. They gave the United States and the United Kingdom access to all facilities that we requested to see. They were willing to permit any tests that we wanted to conduct. They were willing to have their centrifuge program removed … They have been very forthcoming.

In the chemical weapons area, we assisted them in drafting their declaration to the OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]. They had the OPCW technical secretariat come in. On one occasion they said, ‘You know, we really hadn’t told the others that came before, but there are some other munitions we need to show you.’ They took us to a facility that we almost certainly would not have been able to identify independently and showed us the unfilled munitions there. That is transparency. That is the kind of access that we are given when a country has made a strategic commitment. They volunteer information.

Some sources suggest that the procedure was not quite as straightforward as that passage of text implies. William Tobey, for example, argues that Libyan commitment and transparency varied on a day-to-day basis, at least in the early months. (See Tobey’s five-part series in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5, and his 2017 assessment of intelligence and policy cooperation in the Libyan disarmament case.)

It was because of that variability that the Americans wanted to relocate key parts of the WMD program quickly. The most proliferation-sensitive parts of the program—equipment and documents—were airlifted to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The nuclear weapon design documents, revealed to the Americans on 20 January, were flown out of the country two days later.

During the night of 25–26 January 2004, an American C-17, its insignia painted over, landed at an air base near Tripoli, loaded its cargo—including advanced centrifuge rotors, five Scud‑C missile guidance sets and two tons of uranium hexafluoride—and took off again. Later, in March 2004, another 1,000 tons of materials and equipment were loaded aboard a US ship, the Industrial Challenger, its insignia again painted over, and taken to America.

Is that what President Trump is going to propose to Kim Jong‑un? Media sources say that the US has asked North Korea to ‘discard’ the data from its nuclear weapon development program and allow its nuclear scientists to emigrate. Of course, the manner—and direction—in which that data might be discarded is a non-trivial issue.

And emigration would, of course, be a humane solution to an intractable problem: that even after the weapons are gone and the data has been discarded, the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles will still exist in the minds of North Korea’s scientists. I don’t imagine, though, that Washington wants those scientists heading to the Middle East. Russia and China might be acceptable destinations. People say that Tennessee is nice this time of year.

As was the case with the Libyan deal, the US is also arguing that this is an opportunity for North Korea to abandon not merely its nuclear program, but all of its WMD. Still, nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles seem likely to be the core of any deal.

On ballistic missiles, a key US objective in 2003–2004 was to ensure that Libya’s missile program was compliant with the thresholds set out in the Missile Technology Control Regime—namely, that its missiles were limited in their range to a maximum of 300 kilometres and in their payload to a maximum of 500 kilograms.

In short, the Libyan model sets high standards in relation to the exposure of proliferation linkages; provision of access to sites, personnel and materials; relocation of key items; and acceptance of international standards on WMD. Can an agreement with Pyongyang meet those standards? Frankly, it seems unlikely.

The Libyan model, after all, had one driver that might not be equally compelling in the North Korean case: the strategic commitment by the leadership to put aside WMD. Because of that commitment, the model unfolded quickly and the verification hurdles proved surmountable.

A similar level of strategic commitment on Kim Jong‑un’s part is what the Americans are hoping to find in Singapore on 12 June. The Trump administration is certainly signalling that this is their desired approach.