In his annual New Year’s address, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said he is committed to denuclearisation but will change course if the US persists with ‘sanctions and pressures’. The statement confirmed that all steps taken by North Korea to date are fully reversible. Conversely, in the difficult negotiations on denuclearisation, the key principle is ‘irreversibility’. The great wall of distrust built over 68 years’ dealings with one another makes all sides determined to ring-fence the future against the possibility of reversibility by the other side. Without an understanding of all sides’ requirement for irreversibility, progress will remain elusive.

Westerners have difficulty grasping the continuing hold of historical memories in shaping Asians’ current policies. Most also tend not to take North Korea seriously, demonising and caricaturing its young leader as an unserious figure of fun. Few bother trying to understand its security concerns and admit the possibility that its paranoia might be grounded in long experience.

The Korean War began with unprovoked aggression by the North in 1950. Since then, Pyongyang has earned its credentials as one of the world’s worst human rights abusers, as attested in the UN commission of inquiry report and by North Korea’s assassinations of political opponents, terrorist attacks on foreign soil, abductions of Japanese and South Korean citizens, and attacks on targets in South Korea with significant losses of life. It has acquired nuclear weapons in breach of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, made repeated commitments to abandon them in return for security assurances and economic assistance, shelved its nuclear ambitions temporarily, and then broken its promises serially.

The US carried out obliteration bombing of the North during the Korean War, stationed atomic weapons in South Korea in 1958 in breach of the 1953 armistice agreement, and refused to honour commitments under the 1994 agreed framework to provide aid to the North. Many US global actions reinforce the narrative of an America that can’t be trusted. Russia’s actions in Ukraine, China’s defiance of the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s 2016 South China Sea ruling, and the US’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal confirm the ugly reality that big powers get away with breaking international agreements virtually scot-free.

Nuclear weapons earned Kim a summit with US President Donald Trump as an equal; abandoning the quest for them brought an undignified early death to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and renewed threats against Iran. The reinstatement of US sanctions on Iran, explained President Hassan Rouhani and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to the North Koreans, proves America’s bad faith and untrustworthiness. Security to Kim might therefore mean agreeing to freeze his nuclear and missile capabilities at existing levels in order to avoid US preemptive military strikes today, but retaining those capabilities in order to deter punitive US strikes tomorrow.

Despite Trump’s declaration that North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat, the evidence shows that North Korea continues to produce intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear materials. The US cannot accept symbolic but inconsequential dismantlement that ‘can be reconstituted within months’ as an adequate basis for full normalisation and a peace treaty. The declaration of an end to war, once issued, cannot be taken back. It would weaken avenues for US pressure on the North like military exercises and sanctions. So the US demands proof of Pyongyang’s sincerity, with an inventory of nuclear material and production facilities verified by international inspectors.

Pyongyang wants the US to abstain from joint military exercises with the South, provide economic assistance and security guarantees, and open up diplomatic relations. All of these can be suspended at any time without notice on a presidential whim. But complete denuclearisation by North Korea cannot be reversed. So, on 20 December, a commentary published by the official North Korean news agency said: ‘When we refer to the “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” it means the removal of all sources of nuclear threat not only from the North and the South but also from all neighboring areas targeting the peninsula.’ In other words, removing the US nuclear umbrella from Japan and South Korea is a precondition of North Korea’s denuclearisation.

Hence, too, Pyongyang’s counter-demand that the Korean War be declared over in order to launch the process towards full normalisation. The language and numbered sequencing of the Trump–Kim declaration of 12 June were deliberate. ‘New US–DPRK relations’ and ‘a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula’ came before a commitment to ‘work towards’ denuclearisation of the whole peninsula.

Insisting that it has already made enough concessions, North Korea has become more forceful in demanding reciprocal gestures from Washington. In his address to the UN General Assembly on 29 September, Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho noted that ‘continued sanctions are deepening our mistrust’. ‘Without any trust in the US’, he added, ‘there will be no confidence in our national security and under such circumstances, there is no way we will unilaterally disarm ourselves first’. On 2 November, Pyongyang threatened to resume the build-up of nuclear forces unless US sanctions are lifted and bilateral relations are improved.

A split is evident between Seoul and Washington on the use of sanctions as a tool with which to pressure Pyongyang. Against US opposition, South Korea supports a continued loosening of sanctions, arguing that economic development will give incentives to the North to cooperate on denuclearisation. Once sanctions are lifted, however, efforts to reimpose them will be hostage to Chinese and Russian veto in the UN Security Council.

Calculating that Trump has a greater personal investment in a ‘win’ on North Korea, Pyongyang has also been trying to drive a wedge between the president and his senior advisers. Every new hardline comment from Washington is denounced as a violation of the statement and spirit of the Singapore declaration.

We must avoid a return to the ‘fire and fury’ days of 2017 and the associated risk of a catastrophic war in East Asia. This makes it critical, in South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s words, to find the ‘intersecting point’ between the competing US and North Korean calls for steps towards denuclearisation and an end to US hostility.

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.

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.

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.