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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.

The security treaty between Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America—the ANZUS Treaty—was signed in September 1951 and came into force in April 1952. The treaty was one of a network of security treaties entered into by the US covering the Pacific, including bilateral agreements with the Philippines, Japan, Korea and the Republic of China, as well as the Southeast Asia Collective DefenseTreaty.

In the immediate post–World War II years, the US considered such treaties neither necessary nor desirable, but in 1950 this attitude started to change in response to the rise of communism. Meanwhile, Australia and the US disagreed on the terms of the peace settlement with Japan. The US saw Japan as a potential bulwark against communist expansion and therefore favoured a ‘soft’ peace treaty, enabling Japan to recover economically as quickly as possible.

Australia, on the other hand, had been wary of Japanese aggression since the early 20th century, and wanted a restrictive peace settlement to prevent any recurrence of Japanese imperialism and militarism. A peace settlement that permitted Japan to rearm made it all the more important for Australia that there be a security arrangement for the Pacific.

In 1950 these two issues—the peace terms and a Pacific pact—began to converge in discussions between the US and Australia, and ultimately in 1951 the ANZUS treaty was concluded. It was signed within days of the multilateral peace treaty with Japan.

The ANZUS treaty was largely based on the 1949 NATO treaty, but the NATO treaty contains a clearer collective defence obligation in article 5, declaring an attack on one to be an attack on all, and requiring parties to assist the victim state. The ANZUS treaty contains less specific language in article IV:

Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.

The US Congress had been reluctant to ratify the NATO agreement because it appeared to bypass the right of Congress to declare war, so less specific language was used in the ANZUS treaty, and an express reference to internal constitutional processes was added. Notwithstanding this, the substance of the two provisions is virtually identical.

The effect of the NATO article 5 is that if there’s an armed attack against one of the parties, each of the others must decide what if any action to take to assist the victim state, and this can include deciding to take no action at all. The effect of the ANZUS article IV is that if there’s an armed attack against one of the parties, the others must take action. Both provisions leave it to the individual states to determine what action to take, ranging from no action (NATO) or minimal action (ANZUS), through to armed force.

The obligation to act arises only if there’s an ‘armed attack’. The International Court of Justice has affirmed in several cases that an ‘armed attack’ is more than just any use of force. It must be of sufficient scale and effect to amount to the ‘most grave’ use of force. The attack must be ‘in the Pacific Area’, which isn’t defined.

Some guidance is given in article V, which specifies that article IV applies to an armed attack on ‘the metropolitan territory of any of the Parties, or on the island territories under its jurisdiction in the Pacific or on its armed forces, public vessels or aircraft in the Pacific’. Thus, the treaty covers at least an armed attack on mainland Australia, New Zealand and the US, and islands such as Guam.

Would it apply in a confrontation between the US and North Korea? As is well known, the ANZUS treaty has only been formally invoked once, following the terrorist attacks in the United States in September 2001. But the current prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has pledged that Australia would again invoke the treaty if there were an attack on the US by North Korea.

As a matter of treaty interpretation, article IV of the treaty would be enlivened if North Korea used sufficient force against US territory (whether on the mainland or in the Pacific), or against US troops, vessels or aircraft in the Pacific. But if the US were to launch a pre-emptive strike, North Korea could legitimately justify a proportionate use of force in response as lawful self-defence. Thus article IV wouldn’t apply if North Korea’s use of force was either in lawful self-defence against an armed attack by the US, or of insufficient gravity to amount to an ‘armed attack’.

The key question is what article IV actually requires. The only legal obligation under article IV is to ‘act’, and Australia could satisfy this obligation in a range of ways—from informal representations through to the full-blown use of force.

What’s clear is that if force is used, the parameters of self-defence dictate that the force used be no more than is necessary and proportionate in the circumstances. Quite what that might entail in a nuclear conflict is impossible to assess in advance.

Last week’s one-day meeting of Australian and Japanese prime ministers in Tokyo will reportedly lead to strengthened bilateral defence ties, supposedly to enhance regional security in the face of ‘North Korean aggression’ and ‘the strategic rise of China’.

In a joint statement, the two leaders agreed to promote ‘deeper and broader defence cooperation’ this year, including exercises, operations, capacity-building and mutual visits by the military forces of Japan and Australia.

What Australia hopes to gain from upgrading the security relationship remains unclear.

Selling Australian military equipment to Japan and having Japanese forces exercising in northern Australia aren’t problems for most Australians. However, a more substantive link to Japan’s security, such as Australian military personnel training and exercising in Japan, could involve Australia unnecessarily with tensions in Northeast Asia that have little to do with our security interests.

At a press conference with his Japanese counterpart Shinzō Abe, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull commented, ‘We discussed at considerable length the threats posed by the reckless rogue regime in North Korea.’ He went on to say, ‘We discussed the importance of ensuring the economic sanctions are enforced rigorously so that this regime is brought to its senses and stops threatening in the manner that it does the peace and stability of our region.’

Both parties claimed that it’s vital to boost military cooperation given the tense regional situation, ‘with North Korea’s missile programme bringing the world closer to nuclear conflict than at any time since the Cold War’.

Economic sanctions against North Korea won’t be effective in bringing about denuclearisation of the peninsula because Kim Jong-Un sees the nuclear missile program as vital for his regime’s survival. Sanctions will only bring more hardship for North Korean workers who can’t afford to supplement their already-limited food intake.

North Korea becoming a nuclear-weapon state doesn’t spell the end of strategic stability in North Asia—or in the broader Pacific region. Pyongyang’s nuclear missile program is intended to give North Korea the capability to deliver a nuclear strike against US territory—in order to deter the US from attacking North Korea. Japan has never been an intended target, although Tokyo is understandably nervous about North Korea launching test missiles in its direction. No doubt North Korea would prefer to launch its missiles in another direction so the US and Japan can’t recover parts from them, but geography limits its launch options.

North and South Korea are probably best left to work out their relationship for themselves. When they’ve been able to conduct direct talks without US involvement, they seem to have managed reasonably well. There’s certainly a new spirit of harmony between the two at the moment in the lead-up to the Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang. It’s in South Korea’s interest, of course, to be magnanimous about inviting the North to attend the games. This will help ensure that the North doesn’t disrupt them. At the same time, it’s in North Korea’s interest to showcase its softer side on the world stage, and not allow the South to get all the positive publicity.

North–South harmony will probably disintegrate with the next round of US – South Korea military exercises, scheduled for late March 2018—after the Paralympic Games. Pressure to continue the exercises seems to be coming mainly from the US. It’s of course possible that President Donald Trump sees some value in keeping tensions high on the peninsula to distract Americans from his political problems at home. However, high tensions risk miscalculation and escalation.

China’s expanding military and economic influence was also a factor in encouraging Australia and Japan to draw closer militarily. However, upgrading our security relationship with Japan will inevitably antagonise China.

While the US will continue to be our main long-term security partner, China is our main long-term economic partner and far more important to our economy. Beijing seems increasingly perplexed and irritated by what it regards as the hostile policies of the Turnbull government. We should also be wary of becoming too closely associated with the Trump administration’s unpredictable foreign policy and its latest focus on containing China.

What Australia could contribute militarily to Japan’s security would be symbolic rather than useful. The Australian Defence Force is roughly a quarter of the size of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces, and the ultimate guarantor of Japan’s security is the 1960 US–Japan security treaty. Japan and the powerful US Pacific Command are more than capable of coping with foreseeable North Asian threat scenarios without our assistance.

Realistically, Australia’s core security interests lie closer to home, in Southeast Asia, the Southwest Pacific, and the Indian and Southern oceans—and not in North Asia, South Asia or the Middle East. In those more distant areas, Australian military involvement should be limited to small deployments of our very capable special forces soldiers—when it’s in our national interest to be involved. We also have a moral obligation to provide military engineers to assist with reconstruction in former conflict zones when we’ve been a party to the conflict.