Public reactions to prospects for a breakthrough at a Trump-Kim summit are proving a triumph of hope over experience. North Korea has been feeling the heat from the Trump administration’s effective “maximum pressure” campaign, and has every incentive to gut its momentum, or reverse it.
In response, Kim Jong Un has been playing a weak hand well with his charm offensive. His Olympic diplomacy greatly relieved South Korean officials fearful of North Korean efforts to disrupt the games, leading almost to a sense of euphoria in Seoul. (They even picked up the tab for their North Korean visitors’ hotel bills and incidentals, to the tune of around $2.7 million.)
The optics of Kim’s visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping helped bolster Kim’s position vis-à-vis the U.S. and the South, even if China and the North are no longer as “close as lips and teeth” as China’s Chairman Mao Zedong once put it. Kim may also have strengthened his case for the Chinese to cut him some slack on sanctions.
Kim’s proposal to meet President Donald Trump must be seen, from the North’s perspective, as a natural extension of its charm offensive. Kim hopes a summit could halt the momentum for piling on additional sanctions or even lead to a rollback, and could lull the South, or even the U.S., into other one-sided conciliatory measures.
In this context, the major annual U.S.-South Korea joint exercise Foal Eagle was postponed this year until after the Olympics, and is now being shortened from the usual two months to one, presumably to accommodate a potential U.S.-North Korea summit in May.
There is ample precedent littered throughout the history of U.S.-North Korea negotiations: ultimately, in return for ephemeral concessions on its nuclear program, the North walked away with millions in heavy fuel oil, the U.S. unfreezing of the North’s assets in Banco Delta Asia, lifting of the U.S. designation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, among other things. Given a quarter century of unfruitful U.S. negotiations with North Korea, is there cause for optimism that this time it will be different?
Kim has every incentive to hold onto his nuclear weapons, use them to cast doubts on the reliability of the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and thereby drive wedges between the U.S. and its northeast Asian allies. Small wonder North Korea has even enshrined in its constitution that it is a nuclear-armed state.
Kim is no doubt aware of the unfortunate precedents of countries giving up nuclear weapons: Ukraine gave up roughly 1,900 nuclear warheads in 1994 in return for security assurances from Russia, which have been violated with impunity by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Crimea and eastern parts of Ukraine; Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi didn’t fare any better for surrendering his nascent nuclear weapon program to improve ties with the U.S. and West Europe, only to be toppled by them later.
It can also be argued that Kim wins a measure of legitimacy and prestige just by being seen shaking hands with the U.S. president, and that Kim shouldn’t be rewarded for bad behavior.
Given these realities, what can the U.S. reasonably aim at achieving with a US summit with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea? First, the U.S. can be seen as willing to engage in dialogue with North Korea, which is important to reassure domestic and foreign audiences that every reasonable avenue is being given a chance – even if that chance is, at the moment, modest. Substantively, the U.S. could use the opportunity of a summit to communicate at the highest level that maximum pressure will continue to be applied and intensified, to shatter any illusions that the North’s charm offensive will alter that reality, and to paint a bleak future for North Korea absent fundamental changes in its behavior. That could set the stage for future dialogue on a fundamentally different basis.
At a summit, the U.S. also needs at all cost to avoid the mistake of handing concessions to the North to promote good will; it doesn’t work. The U.S. should also cast aside any expectations that the North will necessarily make meaningful progress at a summit.
Having sat across the table from North Korean negotiators, the author believes they are generally rational and clever; for example, they sussed out the staunch Vice President Mike Pence at the Olympics, and decided at the last minute to shop for a more promising interlocutor. At this stage, they can be expected to use smoke and mirrors to try to forestall sanctions and weaken “maximum pressure” without giving up any of the North’s nuclear objectives.
Meanwhile, the U.S. should continue its maximum pressure campaign, including by: gradually ratcheting up secondary sanctions on banks and companies facilitating business with North Korea; changing the strategic equation in the region through regional missile defense and more effective trilateral military cooperation among the U.S., Japan and South Korea; and expanding and intensifying interdiction efforts against sanctions violations. These practical and essential efforts will all find more political support at home and abroad if the U.S. continues to demonstrate its willingness meanwhile to sit down and talk with the North Koreans.
Dr. Thomas Cynkin is a Vice President at the Daniel Morgan Graduate School of National Security. He served in the State Department for 24 years, including as a Japanese-speaking diplomat and as Asian affairs advisor to two Deputy Secretaries of State and two U.S. Ambassadors to the United Nations.
