Outwitted by a smarter political operative

This is not encouraging:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, fresh from a trip to North Korea and a meeting with ruler Kim Jong-un, claimed Sunday that Kim shares the United States’ objectives.

“When I said earlier this week that I think Chairman Kim shares the objectives of the American people, I am convinced of that,” Pompeo told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace. “Now the task is for President Trump and he to meet to validate the process by which this would go forward, to set out those markers so that we can negotiate this outcome.”

Pompeo said the United States would offer “security assurances” to Kim and sanctions relief in exchange for the denuclearization of North Korea.

Of course Pompeo is keen to build up the optimism and the positive momentum prior to the Kim-Trump meeting, but this level of puppy-dog enthusiasm is absurd, and rather encourages the view that the US is being dangerously naive here.

Trudy Rubin is more realistic:

A glance at past North Korean behavior patterns should temper Trump’s expectations. Forewarned should be (but may not be) forearmed.

In the 1980s, South Korean and Western journalists were allowed once a year to cross the demarcation line from the South Korean side of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) to the North, through the building where the 1953 truce was signed. (There still is no official peace treaty.) Penned into a plaza rimmed by North Korean guards, we were confronted by a phalanx of North Korean men wearing Kim Il-Sung buttons who screamed at us the entire time.

By 1992, the standoff at the DMZ was less hostile: That year the two Koreas signed a declaration pledging to denuclearize the Korean peninsula. In 1994, North Korea pledged, in a framework accord with the United States, to eliminate its nuclear weapons. Both promises were abandoned.

By my next visit to the DMZ in 2005, the area was flooded with buses full of South Korean tourists. Later that year, in six-party talks, including China, Russia, the United States, Japan, and South Korea, Pyongyang committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons and nuclear programs. Didn’t happen.

In other words, there’s nothing new about North Korean talk of denuclearization – or the release of the three U.S. prisoners held in Pyongyang (spare a thought for U.S. student/prisoner Otto Warmbier, who was returned in 2017 in a coma and died). Suffice it to say, North Korea is now believed to have at least 60 nuclear weapons, with intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach the U.S. mainland.

Kim believes his bomb and missile tests have propelled North Korea into the ranks of nuclear states. None of the Korea experts I’ve interviewed think Kim will give up all his nuclear weapons. They say the word denuclearization means something very different to Kim and to Trump....

“The deal the North Koreans talk about the most is not Libya,” says Michael Green, national security adviser on Asia to George W. Bush and now a vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s Nixon and Mao — that’s the deal they talk about. Nixon let China keep its nuclear weapons and didn’t pressure them on human rights. What Kim really wants is for the United States to treat him as a nuclear weapons state.”

As for the White House demand that North Korea agree to “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization [referred to as CVID]” – Green says, “That is not something Kim has any intention of doing.”...

Meantime, Kim has already milked huge benefits from Trump’s agreement to meet him, which gives him recognition as a major global player. Kim’s father sought meetings with Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, but never got them.... Kim will be playing the optics of the summit with a skill that matches or outdoes Trump’s theatrics and with a clarity about what he wants and what he will pay for it.

The good news is that superficial talks are better than another war in Asia. The bad news: If Trump falls for his own hype, he may be outwitted by a showman who can best him at this game.

Judging by Pompeo's remarks, the chances that Trump and the US team will be outwitted by a smarter political operative are looking increasingly strong. Kim, let's not forget, now has China's President Xi - a sharp and ruthless political player if ever there was one - whispering in his ear.

Comments

[Naimisha Forest]

Hello Mick. I'm a long time reader and admirer of your blog. However I think you are probably wrong about the current US-Korean talks. It is precisely because the North can now hit the US with nuclear weapons that its past behavior is no longer a good guide. Now for the first time the North can negotiate an agreement on its own terms.

Hate Trump as you will, where the 'America-Firsters' will probably get credit in the long-term historical perspective is to have seen the possibility that the likely N Korean terms are also in the US national interest, because both countries face the same long term strategic threat: China.

I argue this case more fully here: https://naimisha_forest.silvrback.com/towards-the-korean-century

[Mick H]

Thanks for that.

I don't agree that the North has any interest in what the US would understand as denuclearisation. Nor do I see the North as keen to escape on an over-reliance on China. The recent Kim-Xi meetings would seem to argue against that. Kim knows the importance of China. And the only reunification plan that Kim - and Xi - would agree to, it seems to me, is one in which the North would set the ideological tone, and American influence would be reduced to nothing.

Let's not forget that China is reverting under Xi to the kind of totalitarian autocracy that it was under Mao. An independent western-looking unified Korea is not something they're going to contemplate right on their border.

So, I'm not as optimistic as you. But...we'll see.

[Naimisha Forest]

Thanks Mick,
Actually I think the Kim-Xi meetings are more supportive of my case. If Kim's offer to Trump had been planned with Xi, there wouldn't have have been the need for one much less two meetings. The Chinese were blindsided. The two meetings, one hurriedly on top of the other, suggest they are panicked, worried about what Kim is up to. The FT article by Jamil Anderlini that I quote in my post is right I think - the North has every reason to resist growing Chinese domination, on top of deeply embedded anti-Chinese racism, and Korean nationalism in general. But you're right, we must wait and see.
I totally agree about China reverting to totalitarian autocracy. But I'd say it's not reverting to what it was under Mao. Rather it is evolving to a form of totalitarianism more sophisticated and potent as a danger to Western liberal democracy than any that has come before. One concern is that large parts of the Western elites are now quite demoralized, and have lost faith in democracy, especially after the populist upsurge in the US and parts of Europe. Just read the editorial pages of the FT and the Economist these days. China as the savior of Davosian globalization! These elites are now quite susceptible to the attractions of the Chinese model.
But I've probably been reading too much dystopian political fiction for my own good!