[Complicating the task is this: Mr. Pompeo, a former C.I.A. chief who knows the details of the North Korean program intimately and has solicited plans for how to accomplish his goals, must show that he can get the North Koreans to go far beyond the agreement his predecessor once-removed, John Kerry, achieved in negotiations with Iran. Mr. Trump has called that deal a “disaster” for years and pulled out of it two months ago.]
By David E. Sanger
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President Trump used to call the North Korean leader, Kim
Jong-un, “rocket man.”
But over time, Mr. Trump has changed his tune. Published On May
10, 2018
Credit Image by Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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WASHINGTON
— When the North Koreans
were shooting off missile tests and detonating new, more powerful atomic bombs
last year, President Trump responded with threats of “fire and fury” and
ordered the military to come up with new, if highly risky, pre-emptive strike
options.
But since the one-day summit meeting last
month in Singapore, Mr. Trump has done an about-face, while the North’s nuclear
program has continued. “Many good conversations with North Korea-it is going
well!” he wrote Tuesday morning on Twitter.
Even the recent revelations of seemingly
modest North Korean progress on missile technology and the production of
nuclear fuel — including continued work on a new nuclear reactor that can
produce plutonium — have not dimmed Mr. Trump’s enthusiasm. He argues that they
mean little compared to the new tone of conversations, and that even though
North Korea has not disassembled a single weapon, his mission should be judged
a success.
It is that jarring reversal of tone that has
led Mr. Trump’s critics to argue that he was taken in by Kim Jong-un, the
North’s 34-year-old leader.
Turning the enthusiasm of the meeting in
Singapore into a concrete, verifiable agreement is now the job of Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo, who is leaving Washington early Thursday for North Korea. It
will be his third trip there, but the first to flesh out a timetable and a
common understanding of what the Singapore commitment to “work toward
denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” really means.
Complicating the task is this: Mr. Pompeo, a
former C.I.A. chief who knows the details of the North Korean program
intimately and has solicited plans for how to accomplish his goals, must show
that he can get the North Koreans to go far beyond the agreement his
predecessor once-removed, John Kerry, achieved in negotiations with Iran. Mr.
Trump has called that deal a “disaster” for years and pulled out of it two
months ago.
Now, it looms over Mr. Pompeo’s talks.
By engaging Mr. Trump in the process of
“denuclearizing” the Korean Peninsula, Mr. Kim may be calculating that the
president would not dare walk away — especially after Mr. Trump noted before
the summit meeting that “everyone thinks” he should win a Nobel Peace Prize,
before modestly adding, “but I would never say it.”
Still, the test missile engine site that Mr.
Trump told reporters was being dismantled still stands, satellite pictures
show. And the C.I.A., among other agencies, has warned that the North’s
strategy may now be to build up abilities that can be traded away later, hoping
to maneuver Mr. Trump into accepting the country as a de facto nuclear power,
and settle for concessions on the size and reach of Mr. Kim’s nuclear force.
Mr. Trump and his allies say that is
nonsense; sanctions remain and Mr. Trump has not flinched from the goal of
“complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization.”
“There’s not any starry-eyed feeling among
the group doing this,” John R. Bolton, the national security adviser, insisted
Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” saying that most of the major steps toward
denuclearization could be taken in a year. In private, Trump administration
officials say, Mr. Bolton’s view is the same as it was before he joined the
administration: that the North Koreans will never entirely give up their
program.
The big question is whether Mr. Kim is truly
ready to change course or playing for time with Mr. Trump — as his father and
grandfather did with the past four presidents.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump is in sales mode.
Frustrated by the series of reports that the
North is chugging forward, despite its “denuclearization” pledge, Mr. Trump
boasted in a tweet on Tuesday that there had been “no Rocket Launches or
Nuclear Testing in 8 months. All of Asia is thrilled. Only the Opposition
Party, which includes the Fake News, is complaining.”
Then, with a Trumpian flair, he added, “If
not for me, we would now be at War with North Korea!”
Mr. Trump is at least partly right: There
have been no missile or nuclear tests since November, a freeze that many,
including some Democrats, said was a necessary first step. But a freeze and
denuclearization are completely different things.
Mr. Kim retains all of his nuclear abilities,
and thus his leverage. He can resume testing any time. Just a year ago, Rex W.
Tillerson, then the secretary of state, called that position insufficient
because it merely perpetuated an ability to strike that Mr. Trump had, until
recently, characterized as intolerable.
But it also reveals, in perhaps the most
critical national security crisis Mr. Trump faces, his tendency to conflate a
good meeting with a good outcome. It is as if President John F. Kennedy,
meeting with the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev for the first time in Vienna
in 1961, had declared the Cold War solved. The Cuban missile crisis broke open
16 months later.
Mr. Kim has already accomplished something,
too. The heat has been turned down drastically, and the United States has,
unilaterally, suspended military exercises with South Korea.
The Obama administration’s Iran agreement
shadows Mr. Trump’s talks with the North.
The president regularly calls Iran a major
nuclear threat, even though it no longer has enough fuel to make a single
nuclear weapon. Under the 2015 agreement, it shipped 97 percent of its nuclear
material out of the country. And it never possessed nuclear weapons.
Yet Mr. Trump pulled out after concluding
that the United States gave away too much in return for an agreement that would
gradually allow the Iranians to resume production around 2030.
The stark contrast between how Mr. Trump
talks about Tehran, while insisting that the North is “no longer a nuclear
threat,” will become harder and harder to sustain if Mr. Pompeo cannot get Mr.
Kim on a rapid denuclearization schedule.
And Mr. Pompeo will need to achieve an
inspection regime that provides assurance — not only to intelligence agencies
but also to the public in South Korea, Japan and the United States — that the
North is not hiding weapons, missiles or production facilities. The C.I.A. and
the Defense Intelligence Agency believe that, today, it is hiding all three. So
far, Mr. Pompeo has said nothing about the details he intends to present, and
Mr. Bolton suggested that stories about new intelligence on the North’s
improving its nuclear abilities only imperiled the diplomatic process. As a
television commentator and columnist, Mr. Bolton often repeated similar reports
when it came to building his case about how to deal with Pyongyang and Tehran.
One thing is clear, however: The Trump
administration has not uttered the phrase “complete, verifiable, irreversible
denuclearization” in weeks, and Mr. Pompeo has also softened his tone. Some
administration officials say that South Korea urged getting rid of the
everything-must-be-dismantled-immediately approach. And South Korean officials
say that while Mr. Kim might not surrender his entire program anytime soon, he
might dismantle parts of it, reducing his readiness to go to war.
“Perhaps the biggest diplomatic problem the
U.S. will face, if we can get North Korea to agree to fully denuclearize, will
be the timing of that denuclearization and how we verify the component steps,”
William Perry, the former defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, wrote
this week in Politico Magazine.
Mr. Perry, who negotiated repeatedly with the
North, cautioned that “these steps will be complex, will take many months, if
not years, and will require intrusive verification procedures.”
“But the U.S. has negotiated agreements
equally difficult with the Soviet Union, so we do have a positive precedent,”
he wrote.