[The lesson that the North Koreans would take away from the Iran deal, they say, is that the United States can be rolled. The Iran deal is not a permanent solution to the Iranian nuclear problem, they argue, but just a temporary fix. After 15 years, many of the limits on the production of nuclear material will be lifted, even if inspection requirements remain.]
By David E. Sanger
 |
|
President Trump
threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea and called Iran a
“rogue nation” during his
speech at the United Nations General Assembly
on Tuesday. Credit Doug
Mills/The New York Times
|
President Trump is now fully engaged in two
nuclear confrontations, one with Iran over a nuclear accord he finds an
“embarrassment” and the other with North Korea that is forcing the Pentagon to
contemplate for the first time in decades what a resumption of the Korean War
might look like.
The dynamics of those cases are entirely
different, but they are also oddly interdependent. If Mr. Trump makes good on
his threat to pull out of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, how will he
then convince the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, that America will honor the
commitment to integrate North Korea into the world community if only it disarms
— the demand Mr. Trump made from the podium of the United Nations.
The fiercest defenders of the Iran deal argue
that Mr. Trump’s team has not thought about how his threats to Tehran resonate
4,000 miles away in Pyongyang, especially since Iran has held up its end of the
agreement.
“If the President pulls back on the Iran
deal, given Iranian compliance” with its terms, said Wendy R. Sherman, the
chief negotiator of the accord, “it will make diplomacy on North Korea almost
impossible because U.S. credibility will be shot.”
Presumably, the United States would have to
make some concessions to North Korea in return for limits on its nuclear
program. But why negotiate with the United States if this president or the next
one can just throw out any agreement?
Mr. Trump’s aides see the problem and in an
entirely different way.
The lesson that the North Koreans would take
away from the Iran deal, they say, is that the United States can be rolled. The
Iran deal is not a permanent solution to the Iranian nuclear problem, they
argue, but just a temporary fix. After 15 years, many of the limits on the
production of nuclear material will be lifted, even if inspection requirements
remain.
“If we’re going to stick with the Iran deal
there has to be changes made to it,” Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said
on Fox News on Tuesday. “The sunset provisions simply is not a sensible way
forward,” he added, arguing that they amount to “kicking the can down the
road.”
Mr. Trump’s argument goes further. In
interviews with The New York Times last year, he criticized the deal as failing
to address Iran’s missile capability, the detention of American citizens and
Tehran’s support of terrorist groups around the Middle East. He seeks something
more akin to a “grand bargain” with Iran, something the nuclear deal was never
intended to be.
Mr. Tillerson will have an opportunity to
make these arguments on Wednesday at a meeting of all the signatories of the
Iran deal, including his Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad
Zarif. Mr. Zarif used to talk or email every few days with John Kerry, the
American secretary of state who negotiated the deal.
In an interview this summer, Mr. Zarif said
he and Mr. Tillerson had never spoken, and the American-educated Iranian
diplomat left little doubt on Tuesday what he thought of Mr. Trump’s address to
the United Nations General Assembly, in which the president called the Iranian
leadership a “corrupt dictatorship” that masks itself as a democracy.
“Trump’s ignorant hate speech belongs in
medieval times — not the 21st Century UN — unworthy of a reply,” Mr. Zarif
tweeted. (While they will be in the same room, it is not clear if Mr. Zarif and
Mr. Tillerson will talk directly.)
In the end, this entire argument may be moot.
China and Russia have said they have no interest in renegotiating the deal.
Britain and France have said they would be willing to engage Iran in a
negotiation over an addendum to the accord, but the Iranians have rejected that
out of hand. And the White House has never said what, if anything, it was
willing to give up in return for renegotiating the terms.
What is missing from this debate is obvious:
If Mr. Tillerson extracted anything resembling the Iran agreement from North
Korea, it would mark a historic breakthrough, one any of the four previous
American presidents would rightly have celebrated.
The accord that Mr. Trump finds so lacking
would prevent Iran from assembling the makings of a bomb for a year or so, by
the best estimates of American national nuclear laboratories, which advised the
negotiators. By comparison, North Korea already has an arsenal of 20 to 60
fully formed weapons, depending on whose intelligence estimates one believes.
In the best case scenario, some
administration officials say, the Trump administration would be lucky to win a
nuclear “freeze” that keeps North Korea from conducting more nuclear and
missile tests.
But that would enshrine the North Korean
nuclear arsenal at something around its current level, an outcome Mr. Trump and
his national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, have already rejected as
intolerable. And it is possible that the North is even more capable than we
know, some experts say.
Michael J. Morell, a former deputy director
of the C.I.A., recently argued that the North most likely already had
everything it needed to mount an attack on the mainland United States – and
that the only solution is classic containment.
“I believe that North Korea may have the
capability today to successfully conduct a nuclear attack on the United
States,” he wrote recently, saying that Washington was relying on flawed logic
in its assumption that Pyongyang did not possess the technology needed to
deliver a warhead to Los Angeles or Chicago simply because it had yet to
demonstrate the mastery of those technologies.
If Mr. Morell is right — and no one will know
until the North Korean regime collapses and inspectors can assess the extent of
its technology — Mr. Trump faces a problem far more urgent than the one that
confronted President Barack Obama in Iran.
Over the next few months, Mr. Trump must
decide whether it is truly worth the many risks of war to force the North to
disarm, as he has seemed to suggest several times, including in his United
Nations speech, or whether he can acquiesce to Cold War-style containment.
So while Mr. Tillerson presses the Europeans
to add restrictions on Iran, Mr. Trump and the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin,
will be focusing on pressuring China to cut off Pyongyang’s supplies of oil and
gas.
Mr. Mnuchin says he has already drawn up a
list of potential sanctions on Chinese banks, barring those that deal with
North Korea from also dealing with the United States. (It is less likely that
Mr. Trump will make good on his tweeted threat to cut off all trade with any
country that does business with North Korea, which would exact a huge cost on
the American economy.)
But few expect that pressure campaign to work,
and there is already discussion of Plan B. Most of those scenarios are in the
category of what Daniel Russel, the former assistant secretary of state for
Asia, described to the news site Axios as “a sharp, short ‘warning shot’” that
could change Mr. Kim’s calculus about the American willingness to use force.
It is not clear what a warning shot might
look like. Inside the Pentagon, military officials say they are looking at
several options, including cyber attacks that could turn off Pyongyang’s lights
and shooting down North Korean test launches — though Defense Secretary Jim
Mattis noted on Monday that the United States had avoided doing so as long as
the missiles looked as though they would fall harmlessly into the sea.
Mr. Mattis, who previously said a war with
North Korea would be “tragic on an unbelievable scale,” now says he is
confident that there are military approaches that do not risk retaliation
against Seoul. The South Korean capital is 35 miles from of the Demilitarized
Zone that separates the two countries, well within range of thousands of pieces
of North Korean artillery.
Reporters asked how that might be possible.
New technology? A way of finding and silencing North Korea’s mortars?
“I won’t go into detail,” Mr. Mattis said.
Correction: September 20, 2017
In an earlier version of this article, a
picture caption misstated that Ja Song-nam, the North Korean ambassador to the
United Nations, was listening to President Trump’s speech to the General
Assembly. He was pictured at the gathering before the speech began, not during
it.
Follow David E. Sanger on Twitter @SangerNYT.