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In a day of personal diplomacy that began with a choreographed handshake and ended with a freewheeling news conference, President Trump deepened his wager on North Korea’s leader on Tuesday, arguing that their rapport would bring the swift demise of that country’s nuclear program.
Mr. Trump, acting more salesman than statesman, used flattery, cajolery and even a slickly produced promotional video to try to make the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, a partner in peace. He also gave Mr. Kim a significant concession: no more military drills between the United States and South Korea, a change that surprised South Korea and the Pentagon.
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The Summit Was Unprecedented, the Statement Vague and the Day Historic
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| Trump said he believed that Mr. Kim’s desire to end North Korea’s seven-decade-old confrontation with the United States was sincere.Still, a joint statement signed by the two after their meeting — the first ever between a sitting American president and a North Korean leader — was as skimpy as the summit meeting was extravagant. It called for the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula but provided neither a timeline nor any details about how the North would go about giving up its weapons.The statement, which American officials negotiated intensely with the North Koreans and had hoped would be a road map to a nuclear deal, was a page and a half of diplomatic language recycled from statements negotiated by the North over the last two decades.It made no mention of Mr. Trump’s longstanding — supposedly nonnegotiable — demand that North Korea submit to complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization. It made no mention of North Korea’s missiles. It did not even set a firm date for a follow-up meeting, though the president said he would invite Mr. Kim to the White House when the time was right.“This is what North Korea has wanted from the beginning, and I cannot believe that our side allowed it,” said Joseph Y. Yun, a former State Department official who has negotiated with the North. |
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“Kim Jong Un is desperately looking for international recognition of North Korea as a country in good standing, of his right to rule it, and of the legitimacy of his possession of nuclear weapons,” Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korea’s nuclear program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, writes at Foreign Policy./cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/11524169/972037104.jpg.jpg) Many pundits thought there was a very good chance the summit would never happen: that the sides were too far apart to even get to the table. The fact that Trump showed up the most pessimistic expectations is a clear win. [And the fact that the two leaders of the Unites States and North Korea actually met and concluded talks on friendly terms has undeniably made the world a little safer--Esco]/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9030141/5363e40a39e2dbba26be096483df5a2359dff01c.jpg) Here are some things that weren’t mentioned at any point in the statement issued after the summit: North Korean political prisoners, brutal labor camps, and the starvation crisis.There’s a reason North Korea is widely considered the most repressive country on earth. Somewhere between 80,000 and 130,000 North Koreans are currently held as political prisoners by their own government, detained in brutal and vicious gulags. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans have died in these gulags over the past several decades; summary executions and systematic rape are relatively common occurrences.Thomas Buergenthal, an eminent international lawyer and Auschwitz survivor, helped prepare a chilling report on these camps last year. He told the Washington Post that “the conditions in the Korean prison camps are as terrible, or even worse, than those I saw and experienced in my youth in these Nazi camps.”Meanwhile, North Korea has devoted tremendous resources to its nuclear program and military, at the expense of the basic needs of its citizens. UNICEF estimated in January that 60,000 North Korean children were on the brink of starvation./cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/11524231/962844248.jpg.jpg) Trump canceling US military exercises with South Korea is a big, big deal.
The exercises are fairly regular — the next one is scheduled for August — and an important tool for reassuring South Korea that the US is committed to its defense. They also show North Korea that the alliance is durable and serious, thus deterring it from any kind of military probe to test American and South Korean resolve. It’s even more significant because the South Koreans didn’t know about it in advance, and still aren’t sure what it means....The irony here is that South Korean President Moon Jae-in was the driving force behind the peace talks. His diplomatic outreach to both sides — he met with both Trump and Kim multiple times before the talks to lay the groundwork — was vital to the meeting actually happening. Moon assured both sides that a deal could be struck. North Korea’s longtime strategic goal is something political scientists call “decoupling,” which means using its nuclear arsenal as a wedge to break the alliance between the United States and South Korea. Classically, decoupling is supposed to work as a kind of threat: If the North has nuclear missiles that can reach US cities, then the US breaks off the alliance because it’s not willing to put San Francisco at risk to save Seoul. What’s happening now is a bit different. Kim is dangling the carrot of denuclearization to convince Trump to make concessions against the South’s interest, pitting the allies against each other and making an alliance fracture more likely in the long term. It’s a canny maneuver by Kim, and it’s not [likely] Trump knows he’s being played.
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