[The shifts were prompted by internal changes in each country, combined with Mr. Trump’s unorthodox instincts and the views of his senior Asia advisers. The administration now has growing bipartisan support in Washington to widen an emerging global conflict with China and build diplomacy with North Korea.]
By Edward Wong
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President
Trump and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, met at the Demilitarized
Zone last
month. Credit Erin Schaff/The New York Times
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WASHINGTON
— As he tries to tackle the
greatest challenges to American power in Asia, President Trump is overturning
policy toward China and North Korea that for decades was as canonical as
Confucian ritual.
With North Korea, he is engaging with the
enemy in hopes that negotiations will yield a surrender of nuclear weapons.
With China, Mr. Trump says the United States must take a big step back from an
economic relationship that has strengthened a formidable rival.
The shifts were prompted by internal changes
in each country, combined with Mr. Trump’s unorthodox instincts and the views
of his senior Asia advisers. The administration now has growing bipartisan
support in Washington to widen an emerging global conflict with China and build
diplomacy with North Korea.
This week, American negotiators are pressing
forward with the policy transformations.
Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin and
Robert E. Lighthizer, the United States trade representative, spoke to Chinese
counterparts on Tuesday by telephone to continue tough trade negotiations.
Meanwhile, Stephen E. Biegun, the special representative for North Korea, was
in Brussels and Berlin to discuss diplomatic approaches to North Korea.
The meetings follow Mr. Trump’s June trip to
East Asia, where he met separately with President Xi Jinping of China and Kim
Jong-un of North Korea.
“The administration has changed the nature of
U.S. government interaction in many ways with both North Korea and China,” said
James Green, the former senior trade official in the United States Embassy in
Beijing. “In both cases the traditional mechanics of diplomacy have been
upended.”
More important, Mr. Trump has smashed the
very foundations of longstanding policy.
That has alarmed some experts. More than 150
former officials and scholars signed an open letter that the writers posted
last week, denouncing the administration’s combative China policy as
“fundamentally counterproductive.”
“We do not believe Beijing is an economic
enemy or an existential national security threat that must be confronted in
every sphere,” said the letter, which was organized by scholar Michael D.
Swaine.
Yet the aggressive approach to China has
drawn many supporters, including some Obama administration officials and
Democratic leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer. “Hang tough on China,
@realDonaldTrump. Don’t back down,” Mr. Schumer tweeted in May. “Strength is
the only way to win with China.”
Since the 1970s, when presidents Richard
Nixon and Jimmy Carter re-established relations with Beijing, American
officials and experts have contended that economic ties between the United
States and China would anchor the relationship between the two nations and,
perhaps, coax Communist Party leaders toward Western liberalism.
But Mr. Xi, who took power in 2012, has
exercised expansive authoritarian controls. He has detained more than one
million Muslims in camps, reinforced the party’s role across strategic
industries and expanded the military’s footprint in disputed areas of the South
China Sea.
One economist who advised Chinese leaders in
the 1980s, Janos Korani, wrote this week that Western experts like himself had
been Dr. Frankensteins, helping build up China without realizing the eventual
consequences for the West. “Now, the fearsome monster is here,” he wrote.
Trump administration officials argue that
economic engagement without appropriate guardrails created a tyrannical
behemoth that could supplant American supremacy. Some call for long-term
tariffs to “decouple” the economies of China and the United States by breaking
supply chains and other business ties.
“We seem to be at a unique confluence of Xi
and Trump,” said Bill Bishop, an analyst in Washington who publishes Sinocism,
a China briefing. “And Make China Great Again meets Make America Great Again is
a recipe for friction.”
But Mr. Trump rarely if ever talks about
strategic concerns and speaks admiringly of Mr. Xi, leading China hawks to fear
a trade deal with Beijing that relents on national security issues like Huawei.
On North Korea, the general policy since the
George W. Bush administration has been to avoid bilateral diplomacy and impose
economic isolation to force Pyongyang to end its nuclear program.
But Mr. Trump upended that by doing
face-to-face diplomacy with Mr. Kim, most recently when the two strolled for a
minute in North Korea — the first time a sitting American president had entered
the country. It was their third meeting, after a failed Hanoi summit in
February and initial talks in Singapore in June 2018.
Former officials and analysts increasingly
say diplomacy is the only way forward with North Korea, given that it already
has an estimated 30 to 60 nuclear warheads. Longtime advocates of rapprochement
point optimistically to the shifting consensus in Washington.
“My impression is that they are certainly
singing in a new key, and it’s a good thing however or why ever they are doing
so,” said Robert L. Carlin, a former North Korea analyst at the C.I.A. and
State Department.
He added that if the foreign policy
establishment was “reconsidering the situation, what’s possible, what’s
pragmatic and realistic after nearly two decades of feckless policy, that’s all
to the good, and maybe just in time. “
A notable figure now preaching diplomacy is
Michael Morell, the former acting C.I.A. director and host of the “Intelligence
Matters” podcast.
“A negotiated solution is the only solution
to this problem,” he said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on June 30. “There
isn’t a military option. There’s not a covert action option. So getting back to
talks with the North Koreans is important, and I think that’s a good thing.”
He also said the United States would have to
live with a nuclear North Korea because Mr. Kim would not give up his nuclear
weapons program — an assessment reached by the intelligence community. “We
should push for the whole thing, but the best we can hope for is limits,” he
said.
“Containment?” asked Margaret Brennan, the
host.
“Containment,” Mr. Morell agreed.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Morell said the
administration’s ability to shift consensus thinking is only possible because
of Mr. Trump “being the Republican president that he is.”
“So political Washington in its entirety has
come around to the opinion that talking to North Korea is good,” he said.
Trump administration officials stress that
the goal of negotiations is to get Mr. Kim to give up all of his nuclear
weapons. But senior State Department officials are now contemplating
intermediate steps — including reaching a freeze of nuclear activity — rather
than going for a grand deal, as Mr. Trump tried to do in Hanoi.
Morgan Ortagus, the State Department
spokeswoman, said Tuesday that a freeze would be the “beginning of the
process.”
Mr. Trump could shift the consensus further,
if he decides the United States can tacitly accept a nuclear North Korea.
Beyond Mr. Morell, other analysts are coming to that conclusion — one that
would have drawn outrage if mentioned aloud during the Obama administration.
“I can’t see Kim giving up his nuclear
weapons entirely,” said Jean H. Lee, a Korea expert at the Wilson Center in
Washington. “They are his ‘treasured sword’ and all that he has to give him
leverage. But he is willing to barter some dismantling of his nuclear program
in exchange for concessions.”
Under former President Barack Obama, the
United States reached a nuclear freeze deal with North Korea in 2012 but
quickly backed out when Pyongyang announced a satellite launch.
Obama officials stuck to a strategy of
pressuring North Korea through sanctions, which the Trump administration is
also doing. But Mr. Obama did not try face-to-face diplomacy with Mr. Kim —
something that one senior Obama official, Daniel Russel, called “diplotainment”
when done by Mr. Trump.
“It was something the North Koreans
repeatedly requested,” said Mr. Russel, a former assistant secretary of state
for East Asian and Pacific affairs.
He said Obama officials considered it, “but
immediately recognized that it would be worse than foolish to legitimize Kim
with a summit before the groundwork had been laid for a denuclearization deal.”
