[Other complications prevented the talks from making it far enough to even discuss those issues. As the two leaders circled each other over what long-range goals they would agree to in Singapore, it became increasingly clear there were forces at work in both capitals that had a strong interest in failure.]
By David E. Sanger
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On
Thursday, President Trump canceled the June 12 summit meeting with Kim Jong-un,
the
North Korean leader.CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
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WASHINGTON
— President Trump attempted
a revolutionary approach to North Korea — a gamble that negotiating prowess and
deal-making charm in a face-to-face meeting with Kim Jong-un could accomplish
what no American president or diplomat had dared to attempt in the 65 years
since an uneasy armistice settled over the Korean Peninsula.
It was a bold and innovative approach, and
one worth trying, to take on the related goals of a peace treaty and
eradicating the North’s now-substantial nuclear arsenal.
The fact that it fell on Thursday before
getting out of the starting gate, though, underscored how little the two men
understood about each other, or how their words and maximalist demands were
resonating in Washington and Pyongyang.
Mr. Trump approached the North Korean leader
as if he was a competing property developer haggling over a prized asset — and
assumed that, in the end, Mr. Kim would be willing to give it all up for the
promise of future prosperity. So he started with threats of “fire and fury,’’
then turned to surprise initiatives, then gratuitous flattery of one of the
world’s more brutal dictators.
“He will be safe, he will be happy, his
country will be rich,” Mr. Trump said of the North Korean leader on Tuesday, as
he met again with Moon Jae-in, the over-optimistic South Korean president whose
national security adviser predicted, that same day, it was “99.9 percent” sure
that the summit meeting in Singapore would go ahead.
But it was already becoming clear to Mr.
Trump and his team that the techniques involved in negotiating real estate
don’t translate easily into negotiations over nuclear weapons.
Mr. Kim needs money, investment and
technology for sure. But more than that, he needs to convince North Korea’s
elites that he has not traded away the only form of security in his sole
control — the nuclear patrimony of his father and his grandfather.
“For them, ‘getting rich’ is a secondary
consideration,’’ said William Perry, the former secretary of defense and one of
the last people to negotiate with the North over peace treaties, nuclear
disarmament and missiles — in 1999, when he was sent out as President Bill
Clinton’s special envoy. “If I learned anything dealing with them, it’s that
their security is pre-eminent. They know we have the capability to defeat them,
and they believe we have the intent to do so.’’
“And the only way to address that,” Mr.
Perry, now 90, said this week in Palo Alto as the North Koreans were issuing
their latest threats, “is with a step-by-step process, exactly the approach
Trump said he did not want to take.”
Other complications prevented the talks from
making it far enough to even discuss those issues. As the two leaders circled
each other over what long-range goals they would agree to in Singapore, it
became increasingly clear there were forces at work in both capitals that had a
strong interest in failure.
The creators of North Korea’s nuclear and
missile forces are the country’s true elite, celebrated as the heroes who keep
America at bay. To lose their arsenal is to lose their status and influence.
When Mr. Trump sent one of his deputy
national security advisers to Singapore a week ago for a prearranged meeting to
work out summit logistics, the North Koreans stood him up. In the past week,
they did not answer the phone, a senior administration official told reporters
Thursday afternoon.
The North has its own list of complaints.
After Mr. Trump accepted Mr. Kim’s offer to meet face-to-face, he replaced his
national security adviser with John R. Bolton, who just a few months ago
published an essay entitled “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First,’’
an ode to pre-empting Pyongyang — no matter what it promised about the future.
Once he ensconced himself in the West Wing,
Mr. Bolton began talking publicly about the “the Libyan model’’ of turning over
nuclear weapons, a reference to a deal he helped design in 2003 in which Col.
Muammar el-Qaddafi turned over a nascent nuclear program in return for exactly
the kinds of economic lures Mr. Trump was talking about.
To the North Koreans, Mr. Bolton knew, the
Libya example was shorthand for making a bad decision to unilaterally disarm.
They have little doubt that if North Korean citizens rose to overthrow their
government — as Libyan rebels did against Colonel Qaddafi in 2011 — Washington
would be more than happy to help chase down the leadership.
None of this means the initiatives with North
Korea are entirely dead. Mr. Trump carefully left open the door for Mr. Kim to
“call me or write” if he decides to cease the threats of nuclear exchanges and
wants to reschedule the summit.
But Mr. Trump also on Thursday could not
resist echoing his tweet months ago about the size of the nuclear button on his
desk: America’s nuclear capabilities “are so massive and powerful” that he
should never be tempted to reach for them.
It may have been intended to intimidate. But
it seems more likely to spur Mr. Kim to new demonstrations of his own
capabilities to reach American cities with North Korean missiles.
In fact, the question about North Korea now
is the same question that Washington is asking about Iran: What is their next
chess move? Are they likely to escalate?
For now, the Iranians have indicated they are
taking it slow. But history suggests that North Korea’s reaction to the end of
negotiations is almost always to create a crisis — and see if that, in turn,
forces the United States back to the table.
When the “Agreed Framework” with the Clinton
administration collapsed — in part because of North Korean cheating, in part
because of the United States’ lack of interest in moving toward reconciliation
— Mr. Kim’s father moved to the country’s first nuclear tests.
When accords were scuttled at the end of the
Bush administration, the North tested a new president, Barack Obama, with a
series of larger nuclear tests and then a race to build intercontinental
missiles.
Even before he came to office, Mr. Trump
complained — accurately — that the incremental approaches pursued by his
predecessors had failed.
He inherited a North Korea that had exploited
America’s distraction during Iraq, Afghanistan and the Iran negotiations, and
managed to build 20 to 60 nuclear weapons. The North had paid almost no price.
So Mr. Trump did what he learned to do in the New York real estate market: Make
maximalist demands, inflict pain and then begin a negotiation.
But his “fire and fury’’ approach resulted in
reactions he had never seen in the private market. Mr. Moon became so concerned
that a new, famously volatile American president could trip into a war on the
Korean Peninsula, that he raced to wrap Mr. Trump into a negotiation that would
make it difficult for the United States to launch the kind of pre-emptive
attack Mr. Bolton had advocated.
Mr. Moon then showered Mr. Trump with
effusive praise, even to the point of endorsing the premature talk about Nobel
Peace Prizes.
“Moon’s role is what is entirely new this
time,’’ Mr. Perry noted, hours before the summit planning fell apart. The South
Korean president saw himself as the essential go-between, the central player in
coaxing both sides back on track when moments of crisis — like this one —
arise.
Now comes the test of his peacemaking skills.
“The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula
and building a permanent peace on the peninsula is a task we cannot give up or
delay,” Mr. Moon said in Seoul on Thursday, calling the cancellation of the
summit “disconcerting and very regrettable.” He urged Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim to
talk directly.
Mr. Moon’s task is to rebuild what fell
apart. But first there must be a diagnosis of what went wrong.
Overheated rhetoric on both sides — including
unsubtle reminders of each nation’s willingness to wipe the other off the map —
was part of it. But that was an occasional feature of the Cold War, too.
The bigger problem was that the United States
and North Korea were never on the same page about what the objective of the
negotiation should be. Mr. Trump, Mr. Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
had one vision: What they called “complete, verifiable, irreversible
denuclearization.”
But it was a one-sided affair — never once
did they raise the likelihood that the United States would have to give
something up, too.
Mr. Kim used the phrase “denuclearization” as
well, but he seemed to be discussing something more like arms control. He was
willing to give up part of the arsenal, but only as the United States pulled
back its troops in South Korea and gradually surrendered its ability to
threaten the North.
Mr. Trump, of course, talked about the North
giving up all of its weapons in one fell swoop — before allowing, just in the
past few days, that he might be willing to try a more gradual approach.
But that was probably too late.
“Zero warheads was never going to be on the
table,’’ said Robert S. Litwak, senior vice president of the Wilson Center for
International Scholars, who wrote a detailed study of how to deal, gradually,
with defanging the North Korean threat. He said Mr. Trump needs to move to
something closer to the 2015 Iranian deal, which constrained but did not
eliminate Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.
That, of course, is the deal Mr. Trump just
walked away from a few weeks ago, meaning that he now has two nuclear crises on
his hands at once.
