Upside-down negotiations: Trump, Kim Jong Un and North Korea’s nuclear program
Joel R. Campbell
The story so far
For the international community, North Korea is a problem. It is ruled by perhaps the most brutal regime on Earth, which has persecuted 100,000s of its citizens for political crimes big and small, some of which would not be punished in almost any other country; for instance, sitting on a newspaper carrying a photo of the leader on its front page. It is a Communist regime headed by a family dynasty, and its three generations of leaders are lauded with a personality cult that would make Stalin and Mao blush.
Most important for the region and the world, North Korea is a nuclear state that has amassed a considerable arsenal in a little over ten years. The United States and much of the world want to halt the country’s nuclear arms programme, but despite trying a range of tactics, from giving the regime a nuclear reactor to implementing heavy economic sanctions, they have so far been only partially successful.
Enter Donald Trump, who saw the North Korean nuclear issue as ready-made for his self-promoted negotiating magic. While relations were initially hostile, with the US president threatening Kim with ‘fire and fury’, in early 2018 the leaders met at a hastily-arranged summit in Singapore.
The Singapore summit was a news media sensation for a few days. Both leaders seemed to hit it off and they agreed to a set of agreements regarding relations between the two countries, and the nettlesome nuclear issue, that were vague enough to be interpreted quite differently in Pyongyang and Washington DC. However, that is where things bogged down. Though North Korea stopped testing missiles and nuclear weapons, it failed to provide a list of all of its nuclear-related facilities. For their part, the Americans actually increased economic sanctions. Negotiators made virtually no progress, and by September it was almost as if the summit had never happened.
Successive summits in Hanoi in February, 2019, and at the Panmunjom Peace Village in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in June exposed a similar pattern: bluster and threats from the US president; followed by an offer for a summit and a big deal; then a photo-op meeting (or three) which captivates the world and produces an agreement on principles; and finally the promise of real negotiations which result in…nothing.
What went wrong?
Compared with traditional precedents this is a very odd way to negotiate with a country; especially one with which the US has no ongoing relations. In ‘normal’ negotiations, such as Cold War nuclear arms control talks between America and the Soviet Union, mind-numbing technical details were hammered out over years by diplomats quietly meeting in various locations, and with only a couple of exceptions from 1965 onward no summits took place until finalized agreements were ready to sign. The successful record of bilateral and multilateral arms agreements remains pretty impressive.
As Jenny Town of the 38 North website has noted, in a reverse of usual negotiations, only the top level leadership have done any real negotiating. Details were left to working level parties, which tended to get easily stuck. Both sides then elevated issues to highest level for resolution. The two leaders have fundamentally different definitions of success — total denuclearization and opening of North Korea to the outside world for Trump versus phased sanctions relief and graduated concessions and preservation of the nuclear deterrent for Kim. So, the only way to resolve this would be for one of the two leaders to capitulate to the other, and that is unlikely to happen due to opposition within the politico-military establishment of each country.
How to solve the North Korean nuclear issue
So, what is the way out of this impasse?
First, the most important decision for Seoul and Washington DC is whether they can accept Kim keeping his nuclear deterrent. Many observers feel that the DPRK will never give up this hard-won capability, and letting it alone is akin to grudging international acceptance of nuclear arsenals in Pakistan and India. Others find a nuclear-armed North completely unacceptable, and believe that removal of those weapons must be the primary aim of talks. Maybe there is a way to finesse this with stringent requirements for weapons storage and complete prohibition of missile and nuclear testing, leading ultimately to an agreement on nuclear arms reduction.
Second, go back to the approach which worked for both the Clinton administration from 1994 to 2001, and for the George W. Bush administration from 2006 to 2009. The two countries would appoint teams of negotiators, which would get to work on interim agreements. The top leaders would stay away from the negotiations and would avoid any talk of summits for now.
Third, unlike previous frameworks that repeatedly fell apart, any agreements could build in phased, internationally monitoring mechanisms and confidence building measures, such as mutual pull-back of forces from the DMZ that separates the two Koreas, simultaneous destruction of various kinds of weapons on the peninsula, agreement on regularized handling of military moves on the peninsula, and joint observation of military exercises and major military movements.
Fourth, a parallel aim could be gradual normalization of relations, starting with the opening of liaison offices. Finally, Seoul and Washington could encourage Kim to deepen the mild economic reforms he has undertaken, little by little opening up to outside trade and information — provided Pyongyang verifiably gives up internationally prohibited trading and shady international financing.
I use the words ‘would’ and ‘could’ instead of ‘should’, because I know that none of this will happen during the Trump administration. As long as he in office, Trump probably will follow his idiosyncratic approach to talks, and the results will always be the same. If we want real agreements between America and adversaries such as North Korea, they will have to come from another administration.
Joel R. Campbell is Associate Professor of International Relations in the Pacific Region at Troy University.
His recent Book Review Essay, ‘Japan steps up its game: Tokyo’s new security approach and its relations with Asia’, was published in the July 2018 issue of International Affairs.
Read essay online here.
