7/3/19
His advisers will deny it, but when Donald Trump stepped into North Korea on Sunday, he effectively stepped away from his administration’s stated goal of fully eliminating Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons. There were many remarkable aspects of the U.S. president’s surprise meeting with the North Korean leader at the border, but perhaps the most notable was the absence of the issue that brought Trump and Kim together in the first place one year ago: Pyongyang’s development of a nuclear-weapons arsenal that directly threatens the United States and its allies, and which Trump’s advisers once vowed to remove by 2021. From the moment Trump greeted Kim with an extended hand (“My friend! … It’s my honor.”), to their first comments to reporters, to their remarks to the media while meeting one-on-one, the president never publicly mentioned North Korea’s nuclear program, and Kim didn’t bring it up either. Theatrics aside, the third Trump-Kim meeting was the product of deflated ambition. Trump and Kim initially agreed on something general, then disagreed on the specifics, and now were essentially agreeing to disagree. While the first summit, in Singapore, yielded a vague North Korean commitment in writing to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” and the second summit, in Vietnam, ended with no agreement when U.S. demands for denuclearization and North Korean demands for sanctions relief couldn’t be reconciled, the third appears to have featured little substantive discussion altogether.
The most significant result from the DMZ rendezvous was Trump and Kim blessing negotiations between lower-level officials, which more or less returns the process to where it was six months ago, before the Vietnam summit. “‘The United States has accepted North Korea as a nuclear-armed state.’ This is the headline,” the nuclear expert David Santoro noted in reference to the image of Trump and Kim standing beside each other at the inter-Korean border. “Look at the picture—really look at it—and tell me I’m wrong.” The president seems to be betting on, at worst, a drawn-out process in which Kim refrains from additional nuclear and missile tests, and at best, the North Korean leader makes major nuclear concessions as sanctions take their toll. Still, as the North Korea scholar Van Jackson has noted, that’s exactly the sort of outcome you would strive for if you’re tacitly recognizing North Korea as a nuclear power. U.S. officials came around to the idea that they had “no choice but to accept the Soviet Union as a new nuclear-weapons power and manage their relationship,” he said. When it dawns on either Trump or the next American president that neither engagement nor pressure will persuade Kim to relinquish his nukes, the U.S. government will reach a similar conclusion.
