Tag Archive for: North Korea

Is diplomacy on North Korea leading up the garden path and over the cliff?

Pyongyang recently issued a couple of statements that reinforce the view that North Korea has no intention to denuclearise. On 20 December, KCNA, the official North Korean news agency, published a commentary providing North Korea’s definition of ‘denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula’. The statement sought to correct the US’s ‘misguided understanding’ of the phrase, stating: ‘[I]t means … removing all elements of nuclear threats from the areas of both the north and the south of Korea and also from surrounding areas from where the Korean peninsula is targeted. This should be clearly understood.’

Kim Jong-un then gave a New Year’s address in which he emphasised that ‘if the US fails to carry out its promise to the world but seeks to force something upon the DPRK unilaterally … and remains unchanged in its sanctions and pressure upon the DPRK, we might be compelled to explore a new path for defending the sovereignty of our country’.

Through these two statements, the regime in Pyongyang is pressuring the US to not only end all economic sanctions, but also withdraw its nuclear-capable forces from South Korea and the surrounding region. That would imply ending extended nuclear deterrence guarantees to the South to eliminate ‘nuclear threats’ to the North, and potentially ending such guarantees to Japan as well. The US must give all the key concessions up front before North Korea will consider putting its nukes on the table. It’s highly unlikely that the US will make such a bad deal.

It’s also important to judge the success, or lack thereof, of diplomacy by North Korea’s actions. In May, a key nuclear test site at Punggye-ri was supposedly demolished by controlled explosions. However, questions have emerged about whether the act was more show than substance. The authoritative blog 38 North notes that the site may in fact have only been mothballed. North Korea has also offered to dismantle its missile test site at Sohae, while at the same time expanding its nuclear- and missile-testing facilities elsewhere in the country.

Pyongyang’s move to expand its nuclear facilities—potentially to increase the number of nuclear warheads available—and its missile facilities suggests North Korea’s true intent. US President Donald Trump’s boast that with the signing of the Singapore declaration on 12 June last year, the North Korean nuclear threat was over, was, to quote the Bard, ‘a tale told by a fool, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. North Korea can continue to make nuclear warheads if it chooses and produce a full range of ballistic missiles that will, over time, increase the nuclear threat to the United States.

Certainly, proponents of diplomacy—and that includes South Korean President Moon Jae-in—would argue that for North Korean denuclearisation to happen, Kim Jong-un must feel secure. So, peace must come before denuclearisation. Yet this is a strategy of hope on the part of Moon, and others, who apparently believe Kim is sincere about trading nukes for economic growth. That’s a nice idea, but photos of North and South Korean military personnel taking down guard posts and shaking hands don’t translate to real military drawdowns; they are cosmetic steps at best. The huge offensive potential of the Korean People’s Army—including massed artillery against Seoul—remains in place.

The main problem is it’s by no means certain that, once a peace treaty is signed, and once sanctions are lifted and US forces withdrawn, Kim will put his nuclear weapons on the bargaining table. Why would he? He’s gotten everything he needs in terms of a compliant South Korea that’s open to signing a peace agreement. The nukes remain his key source of leverage to coerce Seoul in securing the bigger goal of achieving reunification on his terms.

In any case, the sanctions are already decaying badly. And with a peace agreement in the offing between the South and North, there’s little hope for the US to strengthen the sanctions in the face of opposition from Seoul and to prevent further deliberate Chinese and Russian violations. There’s a growing risk of division between South Korea and the US on how to respond to North Korea’s expanding nuclear and missile capabilities. Kim knows that and has everything to gain and nothing to lose by keeping his nuclear weapons off the table.

Although Trump might be willing to do another bad deal with Kim, like he did in Singapore, his key national security advisers will push back strongly against further concessions to North Korea for little in return. With all the signals out of Pyongyang suggesting no movement on nukes, what’s the point of further diplomacy?

The US is now effectively boxed into a corner. It could try to return to the military, economic and political pressure of 2017—a ‘fire and fury’ Mark II—to force Pyongyang to make real moves towards denuclearisation. The problem is that the 2017 campaign ultimately did not force Pyongyang to negotiate seriously. Kim came to the table not because of pressure from the US, or to give up nuclear weapons, but because he saw an opportunity to gain an advantage over South Korea, divide it from the US and exploit Trump’s ego to secure concessions—and it worked.

A resumption of US harassment in 2019 is likely to encourage more North Korean missile testing and, potentially, additional nuclear testing—perhaps even the threatened atmospheric nuclear test. The US would have to respond, and we would begin the slide back towards a major military confrontation on the peninsula. (To get an idea of what that might look like, read Jeffrey Lewis’s excellent 2020 Commission report on North Korean nuclear attacks against the United States.)

Or the US could accept North Korea’s status as a nuclear-weapon state and embrace strategic patience. Of course, we’ve been down that path before, and it leads nowhere. Such a step would seriously weaken norms against nuclear non-proliferation globally. It would show that a state can break out of arms-control agreements, acquire nuclear weapons, ride out any international opprobrium and emerge as a nuclear weapon-state that other states will do business with.

But adopting a policy of strategic patience doesn’t mean the US should continue to engage with Pyongyang or accept normalised relations. The focus should instead switch to bolstering Seoul’s resolve against likely North Korean pressure to accede to Pyongyang’s demands.

At the height of the fire-and-fury crisis of 2017, I argued for enhanced deterrence against Pyongyang. I still do.

A nuclear-armed North Korea should not be rewarded with economic investment. It should be deterred from using its nuclear weapons—either for threat of use to coerce or from actual use—through a comprehensive, explicit and strengthened US extended nuclear deterrence posture that reinforces the security of both South Korea and Japan. That posture must be complemented with enhanced missile defence and a non-nuclear prompt-strike capability allowing ‘left of launch’ options for the future. Kim Jong-un should be forced to realise that, in the end, nukes have really gained him nothing.

The limits of crisis diplomacy on the Korean peninsula

Images of the leaders of South and North Korea, Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un, laughing, smiling and even hugging, are incredibly powerful. They represent the hope that the Korean peninsula is actually entering a new era of peace. But turning that hope into a reality will require more than crisis diplomacy.

Crisis diplomacy is interaction between states (and non-state actors) under a heightened threat of systemic change or conflict. There are usually just two sides to crisis diplomacy. The aggressor uses provocation and the threat of expanded conflict to force a partner to back down in order to secure objectives. The respondent manages or resolves potential conflict in order to avoid descent into expanded, unmanageable conflict.

On the Korean peninsula, North Korea has been in the aggressor role, while South Korea has been the respondent. The hallmarks of crisis diplomacy—armed infiltrations, assassination attempts, artillery exchanges and naval skirmishes—are a recurring feature of North–South diplomatic interaction.

Crisis diplomacy is a process. It involves high-level decision-making and close political control over military engagement; close coordination between partners and allies; and clear signalling to avoid miscalculation and inadvertent escalation. Actors must set limited, achievable goals and be prepared to accept compromises.

Since the 1990s, crisis diplomacy on the Korean peninsula has followed a trajectory in which North Korea undertakes limited, often non-directly attributable provocations and South Korea manages, de-escalates and then regroups. South Korea’s initiatives to engage North Korea have been marked by the pursuit of high-level access—often leadership summits or close coordination with the US. These initiatives achieved limited objectives—namely, the cessation of the risk of immediate conflict—and have meant accepting options that were previously considered outside the range of acceptable choices, such as economic inducements and financial rewards.

However, the value of crisis diplomacy, and its marketability to stakeholders, reduces as the threat decreases. This effectively places a time limit on associated diplomatic initiatives. Accordingly, while crisis diplomacy provides a set of tools that work for managing and avoiding conflict (or, for the aggressor, achieving limited gains), it doesn’t provide an appropriate set of tools for transforming the root causes of tension.

The dynamic on the Korean peninsula changed with the decision of the Trump administration to reverse these roles. By increasing tension, and threatening escalation, the US assumed an aggressor role. That left South Korea alone in the crisis diplomacy respondent role—on two fronts.

South Korea’s efforts fitted neatly into the mould of crisis diplomacy. The two North–South leadership summits, close coordination with the US and a North Korea – US leadership summit reduced the threat of immediate conflict. Further leadership summits may provide a rationale for economic inducements and financial rewards—in this case, the cessation of sanctions and the opening of joint economic projects.

Crisis diplomacy is limited, regardless of whether we assess the root causes of tension to be North Korea’s nuclear forces and missile programs; conventional forces and intermittent provocations; or political system and insecurity. Leadership summits may provide the confidence and political push to start or finalise negotiations, but they inevitably tempt cynicism.

More innovative, creative diplomacy and coalition-building is required to overcome deeply entrenched, intractable international problems.

There are examples that demonstrate how combinations of states overcame deeply entrenched international problems. In 1986, Australia, in coordination with a number of agricultural exporting states, formed the Cairns Group, and overcame major-power opposition to multilateral trade liberalisation in agriculture. In the early 1990s, Australia, Canada and Japan led efforts towards the Paris peace accords and the securing of a lasting Cambodian peace settlement. In the early 2000s, Canada led an international effort to reassess and reinterpret sovereignty and intervention.

The lull in security tension on the Korean peninsula provides an opportunity to make a similarly lasting change. But the Moon administration must act now.

Five-year presidential terms, a combination of a strong executive and weaker legislative and administrative arms, a weak party system, and a strong preference for differentiation between administrations limit South Korea’s foreign policy continuity, which in turn limits its capacity to sustain initiatives between administrations. Without a diplomatic process that strengthens domestic support, or provides a degree of shelf life, successes achieved through crisis diplomacy will disappear. A crowded global diplomatic agenda further restricts the time available.

There are diplomatic processes available to secure a more durable, longer-lasting process. But the Moon administration must seek them out. At the moment, however, there are no signs that it plans to move beyond the unimaginative, often tried but ultimately fruitless, confines of crisis diplomacy.

Trump’s floundering North Korea strategy

‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ This aphorism, often attributed to Albert Einstein, seems to be the inspiration for US President Donald Trump’s North Korea policy. Trump’s approach has been to reject everything that came before him, while involving himself in negotiations to an unprecedented degree. As a result, the US secretary of state has been reduced to little more than a sherpa for his boss’s summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

The question, though, is whether Trump’s unique approach is actually yielding any results. As of now, there has been nothing to suggest that North Korea is changing its ways. But with another Trump–Kim summit expected sometime in the next few months, we might soon have more clarity on the matter.

Trump claims to have mastered the art of nuclear negotiation—if not the details, then at least its fundamental essence. In March, he interrupted a meeting between his then-national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, and a South Korean delegation to reveal, out of the blue, that he would gladly meet with Kim. He has since followed his own star, always asserting that great progress is being made. After his first summit with Kim in June, he declared, ‘There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.’

In fact, there has been no progress towards denuclearisation. In mid-December 2017, Kim announced that his country had completed its missile-test program, having proven that the latest Hwasong intercontinental missiles are ready for deployment. He also claimed to have developed a nuclear warhead capable of surviving the terminal phase of a missile launch, though experts note that there is still no evidence for that.

By making those announcements, Kim may have been suggesting that he was ready to pursue his goal of ending the Trump administration’s ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions regime through non-military means. But he also might have intended his statements to be taken at face value, simply to let the world know that North Korea had developed both nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

Despite these different possible interpretations, the Trump administration seized on Kim’s statements as a sure sign that North Korea was ready to disarm. And this leap of logic seemed to gain more credence at the summit in June, where Kim ‘reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula’.

But, of course, all the US really got from the summit was a vaguely worded joint statement. The North Koreans, by contrast, made real progress towards their own goal of weakening the US presence in Northeast Asia. Most notably, Trump suddenly seemed to endorse the withdrawal of US troops from the Korean peninsula, and he has since cancelled US military exercises with South Korea.

Meanwhile, the North Koreans have engaged in random acts of ‘denuclearisation’ by closing nuclear test sites that the US hasn’t actually asked them to close. While these acts of decommissioning make for good imagery, they are not a part of any organised effort to identify and dismantle core elements of the country’s nuclear program. At the same time, the North Koreans continue to insist that their nuclear arsenal is a defensive response to ‘hostile’ US policies. The implication is that if the US removes its troops from the Korean peninsula, some degree of denuclearisation could follow.

Complicating matters further, South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s administration has embraced the view that strong incentives and deeper integration are more effective than sanctions for bringing about denuclearisation. Thus, in its ongoing parallel talks with the North, it has essentially decoupled inter-Korean diplomacy from the nuclear issue.

Still, South Korea has also continued to act as a broker between the US and the Kim regime. Whenever the US – North Korea talks have hit a snag, Moon has stepped in to revive them, often by throwing bouquets to both Kim and Trump as encouragement to continue. But while the US and South Korea have remained in close contact, North Korea has most likely been trying to create tensions between the two allies by telling them each slightly different things.

For its part, the Trump administration has done a good job of maintaining the US alliance with South Korea. To this day, many Koreans blame the US and other outside forces for Korea’s tragic division, and the Trump administration has been careful not to criticise Moon’s inter-Korean dialogue publicly. That said, it is clear that the inter-Korean talks are making it increasingly difficult to apply pressure on the North, especially now that South Korea has begun to explore the possibility of sanctions relief.

The last major player is China, which doesn’t seem to know what to make of the North Korean denuclearisation process. China’s decision to punish South Korea for hosting a US missile-defence system greatly diminished its standing among the South Korean public and undermined its ability to influence South Korean policies. But in the months leading up to the Trump–Kim summit in Singapore, China hosted Kim twice, and again immediately afterwards, effectively reasserting its influence over the North.

In keeping with his effort to break from his predecessors in every way, Trump seems to believe that it is easier to work against China than to work with it. That proposition is sure to be tested in the weeks and months ahead.

What ‘denuclearisation’ means to Kim Jong-un

In the wake of the recent North Korea – South Korea summit, it has become clearer than ever how Kim Jong-un defines ‘denuclearisation’: it’s a series of limited unilateral declarations which constrain the North’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs in the order and to the degree that best suit Pyongyang’s strategic interests, and from which he might escape at a time of his own choosing. In going down that path, Kim is playing from an old song book—Asian nuclear arms control has typically relied much more heavily than its Western counterpart on the concept of voluntary self-restraint.

A recent article in the New York Times argued that Kim has figured out he can keep his nuclear program going, just as long as he does it quietly—following in the footsteps of India, Pakistan and Israel. There’s a large element of truth in that. But Kim’s not just trying to make North Korea look like the other non-P5 nuclear-weapon states. By accepting a series of self-imposed limitations and (conditional) obligations—in relation to nuclear and ballistic-missile testing, missile-engine test stands, and some parts of the ageing infrastructure at Yongbyon—Kim’s trying to make North Korea look like the other Asian nuclear-weapon states (China, India and Pakistan), none of which has a particularly strong record of formal, legalistic nuclear arms control of the type most favoured in Washington.

Western arms control—and Russian, for that matter—turns upon exactly that legalistic, exegetical approach, in which constraints are specifically defined. Think of the SALT and START agreements, for example. They wrestled English and Russian adjectives to the floor to define the specific obligations of their signatories. What counts as a strategic nuclear delivery vehicle? How many manoeuvrable, independent re-entry vehicles are allowed, and on which missiles? What do verification measures look like? When do obligations start and finish? What are the provisions for extending the treaties?

Interestingly, the P5+1 ‘sold’ that model of arms control to Iran with the negotiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action: anyone who cares to browse the agreement will find a dense thicket of regulation, touching even Iranian enrichment research and development efforts in relation to specific centrifuge models. (True, some thought the agreement didn’t regulate the right things, but that’s another matter.)

Kim’s not interested in going down that route. The North Koreans have been suspicious of detailed verification regimes involving international experts ever since the International Atomic Energy Agency picked apart their initial statements about plutonium reprocessing in 1992—back in those heady days when North Korea was a party to the non-proliferation treaty. For obvious reasons, Kim’s in no hurry now to clarify North Korea’s existing capabilities. He hopes to keep as much of his arsenal as he can—and the easiest way to do that is to conceal the dimensions of that arsenal.

Nor does he believe that he has to accede to the Western model of arms control. A distinctive Asian model has emerged over the decades—one which helps offset the portrayal of Asian nuclear-weapon states as more worrying than their first-world counterparts. True, Asian nuclear powers are less attracted than their Western counterparts to formalised game theory as a guide to effective deterrence—but that doesn’t mean their decision-making is emotive or irrational. Their command and control structures are typically less well resourced than those run by the US and Russia—but it’s probably wrong to think of those structures as inherently fragile. And Asian nuclear-weapon states are less driven by ideology than were the dominant nuclear players of the Cold War—but they’re not rabid nationalists automatically driven towards ready use of nuclear weapons.

Kim’s principal challenge, of course, is going to be convincing the Americans that he’s done enough to be given a pass mark on denuclearisation. That’s going to be hard, for three reasons. First, the pace of North Korean development in 2017 was so frantic—and so astonishing—that what might easily have qualified as a pass mark at the beginning of January almost certainly wouldn’t have done so by the end of December.

Second, the perceived value of voluntary self-restraint isn’t fixed—it varies from country to country and from time to time, in relation to the nature of both the leadership in the self-restraining state and the intelligence about the probable existence of covert programs that undermine the validity of the original commitment. Both the Kim family’s long history of aggressive behaviour and Kim Jong-un’s more recent efforts to conceal key elements of his program surely dilute the value of any pledge of self-restraint.

And finally, in the months since the Trump–Kim summit in Singapore, it’s become apparent that Kim has no intention of throwing away a capability which has seen him feted at diplomatic summits, redefined the relationship between the two Koreas, and helped to break the back of the previously worrying sanctions regime.

Sadly, North Korea doesn’t look self-restrained. Nuclear weapons sit in the foreground of its military capabilities, not in the background. Developments in its nuclear program aren’t slow and predictable, but volatile and unpredictable.

Of course, Kim has two things counting in his favour. The international community is fearful that true denuclearisation might come only with a high price tag. And the current US president seems more willing than the broader US national security community to tolerate a degree of smudging of the definition of success—in part to keep alive the notion that the Singapore summit was instrumental in managing the North Korean nuclear threat.

Denuclearising the Korean peninsula: the price keeps going up

As the weeks roll into months since the breathless spectacle of the US–DPRK summit in Singapore last June, it gets harder to believe that the event broke the issue out of the deep rut it had been allowed to descend into since the DPRK (supported by Moscow and Beijing) attacked the South in June 1950. Pyongyang’s singular journey since that time to become arguably the most isolated, impoverished and repressive regime in the world—a regime that repeatedly displayed a fierce belligerence towards the US and South Korea—has been all but forgotten.

The DPRK has implicitly justified its draconian domestic arrangements as a necessary response to the constant threat of renewed invasion by these states. It expanded its conventional forces to an astonishing total of over 1.1 million (out of a population comparable to Australia’s), before setting out in the 1980s to acquire a nuclear-weapons capability.

No one has succeeded in calling this fantastic construct into question. Moscow tried, once, way back in 1956, which was before it had fully taken shape. Beijing has essentially gone along with it all, remaining discreetly but dependably protective of the DPRK and, when pressed, insisting that it was entirely a US problem.

The Trump administration agreed to a summit with the DPRK in the apparent belief that no one was in any doubt about where the onus of responsibility lay for the parlous state of affairs on the Korean peninsula. All those UN Security Council resolutions confirmed it. A phase of maximum pressure with sanctions, the spectacle of a summit with the new US president with legendary deal-making skills would be the magic combination to untangle this stubborn Gordian knot.

As it turned out, the summit was worryingly thin and the sense of commitment and mutual engagement evaporated together with the departing leaders.

The absence of any interest in doing some essential homework to set the stage for a renewed push to secure a negotiated outcome is proving to be costly. In the leadup to and since the summit, Kim Jong-un has conspicuously conducted himself as the aggrieved party. His posture has been the embodiment of national security 101: the DPRK was driven to nuclear weapons by the unprovoked extreme and relentless hostility of others—but, should that hostility be unmistakably erased and replaced by friendship, trust and engagement, the DPRK accepts that its nuclear weapons will look out of place and be prepared to seriously consider dismantling them.

How Kim got to this point—where the onus is on the US to prove the absence of enmity and display its preparedness to give friendship, trust and engagement credibility and permanence—will be studied for a long time as an exercise in skillful gamesmanship.

In the lead-up to the Singapore summit, Kim conceded nothing to US posturing in favour of a fast-tracked ‘Libyan’ solution and eventually had Donald Trump also foreshadowing a number of bilateral summits. Most importantly, however, with the Singapore summit locked in, Kim abruptly re-engaged with China and has since made clear that the close relationship of the past has been restored.

Whether the ground for this critical development had been quietly prepared beforehand is not known. Nor is anything known about the terms of the re-engagement or any understandings between the two states on the objectives to be pursued in future DPRK–US negotiations. The secrecy that has always shrouded this crucial dimension of the Korean puzzle has bedevilled all past negotiations.

Since returning from Singapore, Kim has presented the apparent disabling of his underground nuclear test site and of a rocket engine test facility, plus the repatriation of remains of US and allied servicemen from the Korean War, as his initial down payment and looked to Washington for reciprocity, particularly in winding back sanctions.

He has displayed a new obsession with economic development, a stance that has wrong-footed the US, making it look mean-spirited, because it has prolonged sanctions in response to the absence of serious progress on denuclearisation. The important bits of the DPRK’s nuclear program—the production of fissile material and missile systems—have, if anything, been expanded since Singapore.

The Trump administration has belatedly cut its losses by downgrading the point of contact with Pyongyang to a special envoy from the business world with no background in the issues—not even the secretary of state, let alone the president. It has also signalled that it’s taken note of Beijing’s close association with the stance being adopted by Pyongyang.

From the narrow perspective of gamesmanship and posturing, the DPRK is way ahead on points. The bigger conclusion is that the glimmer of an opportunity to defuse the DPRK nuclear issue with a degree of surgical precision has passed. The DPRK–China team has reaffirmed that this will happen only in the context of a much broader exercise in geopolitical engineering.

Trump is in denial about North Korea

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.

Partial disarmament won’t stabilise the Korean peninsula

Following the landmark Trump–Kim summit, analysts quickly began speculating about what could realistically be achieved in the way of denuclearisation. A scenario where North Korea freezes its nuclear program and reduces, but doesn’t entirely eliminate, its nuclear arsenal and facilities has been offered as an imperfect but nonetheless workable outcome. Yet the reality is that partial disarmament is unlikely to do much to ease regional tensions.

Pre-summit calls by the US for complete verifiable, irreversible denuclearisation were never going to materialise. Kim Jong-un fears that giving up his nuclear weapons would leave him vulnerable to suffering the same fate that befell Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. He also seeks the international prestige that comes with being a nuclear-weapon state.

Donald Trump’s decision to walk away from the Iran deal and his appointment of John Bolton—a longtime advocate of regime change in Pyongyang—as national security adviser have done little to improve trust between the two nations. Accordingly, Kim has advocated a ‘phased’ and gradual approach to ‘denuclearisation’ (or at least what he understands denuclearisation to mean), whereby any steps by Pyongyang are met with simultaneous concessions from Washington.

Nobody outside of the hermit kingdom knows for sure how many nuclear weapons North Korea has, or, crucially, whether it has the capacity to launch a long-range nuclear missile strike. Various estimates suggest that it has up to 60 nuclear weapons and large uranium stockpiles. The latest series of missile tests suggest that it possesses ICBMs that are theoretically capable of targeting US territory.

However, there are several signs that Kim is serious about improving North Korea’s economy and ending his country’s international isolation. Kim’s no fool, and he knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Trump is hypervigilant about avoiding what he perceives to have been the overly concessionary approach of the Obama administration, and Kim will have to take concrete steps towards denuclearisation in exchange for any meaningful concessions.

It is against this backdrop that some have cautiously suggested that Pyongyang will freeze its nuclear program and eliminate part of its arsenal, leading to a more stable Korean peninsula. But, assuming partial disarmament occurs, would it actually do much to ease regional tensions?

To answer that question, we need to think about what a reduction of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal would look like in practical terms. While Kim may be more set on economic growth and integration into the international community than his father and grandfather were, it’s difficult to imagine that he would fully trust American security guarantees—even after a long, drawn-out period of mutual concessions. As Gaddafi learned, talk can be cheap.

It’s unlikely that the North Koreans will give up a sizeable proportion of their arsenal, or their trump card—the Hwasong-15, the ICBM potentially capable of reaching the American mainland. Any large reductions would also undermine Kim’s pursuit of international prestige.

North Korean disarmament will probably at most be limited to the elimination of nuclear warheads and production facilities deemed to be superfluous. Perhaps the most tangible benefit Washington can hope for is that a freeze in Pyongyang’s nuclear program will stop it perfecting the technology needed to carry out a successful strike using the Hwasong-15 missile.

While Trump will hail any North Korean concessions as proof of his own negotiating genius, formally accepting Pyongyang as a nuclear power by lifting sanctions and normalising relations would undermine US credibility and be politically disastrous domestically, while sending a dangerous, encouraging signal to other countries thinking about developing nuclear weapons.

In the event that Pyongyang fails to denuclearise, Washington will likely return to something resembling the ‘maximum pressure’ approach. Even if North Korea takes steps towards disarmament at some point, we will likely return to square one, where the possibility of conflict cannot be ruled out—especially if Pyongyang recommences nuclear tests.

Reinstalling or ramping up sanctions against Pyongyang would likely further polarise the Northeast Asian security environment. Japan—which has expressed misgivings about Trump’s diplomatic approach—doesn’t want another nuclear-armed neighbour and would almost certainly support Washington. However, China and Russia—which are more concerned with maintaining stability than with seeing a denuclearised North Korea—may be unwilling to return to squeezing the Kim regime, especially if Pyongyang takes genuine steps towards disarmament. South Korea’s position would be more ambiguous and would largely hinge on the extent of Pyongyang’s disarmament and whether the dovish Moon Jae-in remained in power.

Any North Korean steps towards denuclearisation should ultimately be encouraged. But, given the current political dynamics, anything short of full denuclearisation—although preferable to the tensions of 2017—is unlikely to pay significant peace dividends.

The despot and the diplomat

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.

Korea: It’s the present versus the past

Once again we’re embarked on an endeavour to defuse the Korean peninsula as the perennial flashpoint in Asia. We’ve been here before—notably during the 2003–05 six-party talks—so we know most of the important bits of the puzzle.

What we don’t yet know is whether all the key players can accept a common objective and will pull their weight as we try to figure out how to arrange the pieces, and in what sequence. But what’s promisingly distinctive about this attempt is how much of the initiative has come from the DPRK and the fact that it relied on building new bridges to South Korea to develop the initial momentum.

The outreach to South Korea (via the winter Olympics), the North–South summits and the attractive challenge to the US for the first-ever US–DPRK summit were, in my view, premeditated rather than spontaneous spur-of-the-moment actions. We can infer from this that the rather spectacular success of the DPRK’s trials with different nuclear warhead designs and long-range means of delivering them gave Kim Jong-un the ‘face’ and the confidence he needed to explore the US’s preparedness to consider decisive change on the Korean peninsula.

Premeditation doesn’t necessarily mean bad intentions. It seems most likely that Kim has a vision (perhaps more than one) of how the DPRK can find a niche for itself in Northeast Asia that’s at least significantly different from what currently seems inevitable: brandishing its nuclear weapons, having few if any international partners, being depleted by sanctions and remaining utterly dependent on China.

We’re now on a journey to see whether that vision is attractive to the other key players and whether they’re prepared to bear the various costs associated with realising it. Among other things, Kim seems more willing than his father to regard change within the DPRK as an inescapable part of a new deal.

The Singapore summit was crucial because the issue needed a unique spectacle to crack the ice and loosen the pieces to allow the players to imagine rearrangements and new shapes. The outcome was by no means breathtaking, but there should be enough in the joint statement and the theatre of the summit to keep matters from settling back too quickly into familiar patterns. And both sides—but especially the Trump administration—learned some important lessons relatively cheaply.

One lesson is that the playbook of unsettling and destabilising a prospective negotiating partner doesn’t travel easily or well from the business arena to international security affairs. In the initial period after President Trump accepted the summit, the DPRK quietly stressed that it looked forward to building trust over a number of such meetings. By contrast, senior figures in Washington tried to build momentum for fast-tracked denuclearisation that would be triggered by a single meeting. In the period immediately before the Singapore meeting, Trump was trying to present the idea of a string of summits as his own wisdom.

A second lesson is that, irrespective of innate negotiating instincts, there’s no substitute for a deep familiarity with the core issues and how they have developed and intersected over time. The US decision to suspend US–South Korean military exercises, and to concede that they were ‘provocative’, was needlessly generous. It plays into the familiar generic DPRK charge that it must suspend engagement because of America’s ‘hostile’ attitude. This concession will cast a long shadow over the negotiations. It will be replayed to foster the image that the DPRK’s military posture and actions are entirely reactive, when the opposite is much closer to the truth.

The negotiations to find a new equilibrium in Northeast Asia based on a formal end to the Korean War have a long way to run. We have made a refreshingly novel start, but that novelty will, and should, progressively fade away as talks confront the core issues associated with why the war was fought and how its consequences have been managed since.

All negotiations involve blending a dispassionate assessment of the issue as it stands and an appreciation of how it came to acquire its current characteristics. The art form lies in mixing and deploying the blend. Trump lives in the present and, across most issues, dismisses what was done in the past as either irrelevant or bad and misguided. It’s hard to dispute that the Korea question needed some Trumpism to find a way in. The worry is that the people on the other side of the issue are all about history. They started the war, and they came so agonisingly close to success that living with the inconclusive outcome was even harder to endure. Initially at least, they will be testing the scope for these prospective negotiations to nudge the configuration of Northeast Asia in much the same direction that they hoped the 1950–53 war would deliver.

Can Trump do his part? Can he assemble a quality team and make astute judgements on when to wade into the negotiations and when to stay out, even if it means other people being credited with important accomplishments? Rather a lot hangs on being able to say ‘yes he can’.

In the same vein, can Pyongyang and Beijing reach a stable understanding on how the DPRK’s negotiating position will be determined? This is a critical aspect of the entire exercise but one that is, and will remain, essentially invisible. It’s just one reason to think that encouraging the Pyongyang–Seoul axis to become the primary channel of negotiation might be conducive to durable outcomes.

Still, if our odd couple ever get to the point of sharing jokes about their respective superlative personal attributes—not even Trump is in Kim’s league in that department—they might well write a very useful page of history.

The Singapore summit’s uncertain legacy

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.