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The Trump-Kim Pact was a con by both men. We’re the marks.

WHEN I FIRST WROTE ABOUT THE TRUMP-KIM NON-AGGRESSION PACT, I expressed pessimism but reserved judgment until I knew more about its vague terms. I now wonder if history will record it as the most disastrous international agreement since Molotov-Ribbentrop, one that will put the U.S., South Korea, and Japan forever under the shadow of North Korean nuclear blackmail, forever break the global nonproliferation regime, mark the beginning of the end of South Korea’s experiment with liberal democracy, and put us on the path to an inevitable war that could draw in China or Russia. The latest revelation is that Trump’s talk of complete denuclearization before North Korea gets any concessions may have been little more than that—empty talk.

The U.S. administration has previously demanded that North Korea agree to abandon its entire nuclear program before it could expect any relief from tough international sanctions. Ahead of the Singapore summit, Pompeo said Trump would reject anything short of “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization.”

But following talks on Sunday between U.S. envoy Sung Kim and North Korean counterparts to set up Pompeo’s latest Pyongyang visit, this “CVID” mantra appears suddenly to have disappeared from the U.S. State Department lexicon.

It says pressure will remain until North Korea denuclearizes, but in statements this week, has redefined the U.S. goal as “the final, fully verified denuclearization of (North Korea) as agreed to by Chairman Kim.”

Two U.S. officials said the Trump administration had stepped back from its CVID demand on South Korea’s advice. [Reuters]

To be sure, this report is thinly sourced. Maybe by this time tomorrow, some person in the administration will deny it. But will that person speak for both the State Department and the National Security Council? Will that person speak for a President who insisted on one-on-one negotiations with Kim and acts like a government-of-one? This is only the latest disturbing revelation about a deal that looks worse all the time.

No doubt, the nonproliferation twitterers—who don’t know enough about North Korea to understand what it wants nukes for, don’t know why allowing it to keep “just a few nukes” isn’t acceptable, and can’t grasp that its signatures mean nothing—will cheer. But from where I sit, Trump’s North Korea policy just went from the least-bad of my lifetime to easily the most dangerously weak. Much like its predecessors, Agreed Framework III is neither an agreement nor a framework, but a stalling tactic, a sanctions wedge, and a means to extort more incremental concessions to consolidate Pyongyang’s creeping hegemony over Seoul. From Pyongyang’s perspective, it’s working perfectly.

Whatever terms were agreed at Singapore, there’s no denying that Trump promised us that “maximum pressure” would continue until Pyongyang was disarmed. That was the “mistake of the past” he promised he would not repeat.

But one reason to credit the Reuters report is that Pyongyang has suggested that Trump did agree to lift sanctions before it fully disarms. Unfortunately, Trump and Kim are the only two people who know for sure.


Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, previously denied that. As I’ve explained, the law forbids it, and Republicans in Congress sound ready to hold Trump to the law. Given Pyongyang’s patent desperation to lift sanctions, that puts either Trump and Kim, or Trump and Congress, on a collision course.

Unfortunately, not enforcing sanctions actively is the same as lifting them passively if Russia and China take Trump’s deal as a green light to do what they’ve always tried to do—ignore them. I see signs that they’re already doing that. Why, it’s almost as if they really do want North Korea to have nuclear weapons, despite all of their pro forma protestations.

It won’t help Trump’s argument that Pyongyang is actually accelerating its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile production, according to our intelligence agencies and a few (predominantly left-leaning) nonproliferation experts. We now know that since Singapore, Pyongyang has concealed its nuclear stockpiles and pressed the accelerator on both its nuclear weapons (here, here, here, and here) and missile production (here, and here). What we have then, is just what the most extreme appeasers in Washington in Seoul wanted—a denuclearization deal without denuclearization. This is not in any sense the end of North Korea’s nuclear threat, contra Trump’s implausible boasts. On the contrary, it will mark the beginning of an aggressive metastasis of that threat.

~ ~ ~

That Pyongyang would renege was so predictable that some of us predicted it, though this required no clairvoyance and only a cursory understanding of history. Agreed Framework I lasted five years before we learned that Pyongyang had built an undisclosed uranium enrichment program, and not even President Clinton could certify Pyongyang’s compliance with it. Agreed Framework II lasted for about a year and a half before Kim Jong-il balked at verification and even the New York Times declared it a dead letter. The 2005 Joint Statement lasted less than a day before Kim Jong-il declared that it was all conditioned on the completion of two light-water reactors. Barack Obama’s Leap Day Deal lasted about two weeks before Kim Jong-un announced a missile test. Pyongyang’s promises have short half-lives.

Unfortunately, we still don’t know exactly what His Porcine Majesty did promise Trump, or vice versa. The text of the deal confronted none of the most contentious demands of either state. It did not say what North Korean WMD programs would be dismantled or when, what sanctions would be lifted or when, whether or how Pyongyang’s disarmament could be verified, or what either side would do to guarantee the security of the other, of Japan, or of “south” Korea. The bipartisan reaction from Capitol Hill was … skeptical.

 

 

If you and I don’t know what Trump gave Kim, or vice versa, neither does Trump’s own cabinet. There is ample evidence of confusion and conflict from inside the administration about the sub rosa terms of the agreement. Soon after the Singapore meeting, Pyongyang claimed that Trump agreed to its idea of “phased” denuclearization—an obvious stalling tactic—and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lent support to that claim by saying that there was no actual timeline for Pyongyang’s disarmament. Then, last Sunday, National Security Advisor John Bolton said that he had developed for Pyongyang’s denuclearization—and for dismantling its other WMD programs—and that Pompeo would soon be negotiating its implementation in detail with its diplomats. Since then, the State Department has again refused to say if there is a timeline for North Korea’s denuclearization.

Other terms were agreed but were not in the text. These include Trump’s unilateral agreement to freeze military exercises, and a reputed North Korean agreement to freeze nuclear and missile tests that Donald Trump has since boasted about on Twitter. That possibly spontaneous concession caught at least two key Republican senators, and the Vice President, completely off guard, even if it was a concession that Moon Jae-in, Moon Chung-in, and Im Jong-seok must have welcomed privately.

That may be why Secretary of State Mike Pompeo later walked that concession back.

Pyongyang won’t accept that condition on what amounts a freeze-for-freeze deal, of course.


[Did I just see a goalpost move?]

Pyongyang’s objections won’t cost me any sleep, but we can’t hold exercises if our nominal ally in Seoul doesn’t want them and doesn’t have an effective political opposition to force it to pretend otherwise. Maybe I shouldn’t get too excited about the defense of a country that isn’t entirely serious about defending itself, but I can’t help getting excited that our troops in Korea and their families are increasingly vulnerable without sufficient training and robust missile defenses. We want to pretend that the situation in Korea is normal. It isn’t. A prudent step would be to terminate all command-sponsored tours in Korea to get as many American spouses and kids out of harm’s way as possible. That would also have the secondary effect of reducing the number of USFK civilian employees and could have additional cost savings.

There are other terms where it isn’t clear that there was any mention at all. For example, on human rights, we have only Donald Trump’s word that he so much as raised it in a private conversation with His Porcine Majesty. If so, the mention appears to have been perfunctory. Congress isn’t happy about that oversight.

Accommodationists in Washington and Seoul have long counseled the omission of human rights from the agenda; for just as long, I’ve argued that the accommodationists have the sequence entirely backward. There can be no peace as long as North Korea menaces us, and North Korea menaces us because of a malignant political system that requires external enemies to justify privation, that needs privation to maintain the dependency and isolation of its subjects, and whose threats go far beyond nuclear weapons. There can be no true disarmament without verification, no verification without transparency, and no transparency without openness, and no openness without fundamental political reforms. And contra Moon Jae-in, nothing good can possibly come of reunifying an increasingly vulnerable and wavering liberal democracy with an emboldened, nuclear-armed, totalitarian state.

Trump may still be irrationally exuberant about this deal …

but the signs that Pyongyang is already reneging mean that an already-skeptical Congress will increasingly turn against it.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has demanded the Trump administration submit its deal to the Senate for ratification as a treaty, and the administration has committed to doing that. But given the deal’s lack of specificity, what would the Senate even be ratifying? Under the best of circumstances, ratification will be an uphill battle. How could senators even know what they’re voting on? Would the Foreign Relations Committee support it when so many of its members and its Chair have so many unanswered questions and complaints about it? Would Congress want to vote on this stinker before the mid-term elections, and if not, will Pyongyang wait that long for its payday?

A vote today would be an act of faith in Kim Jong-un, and in a President who seems to have misplaced his faith in him. Congress does not share that faith. Someone is being conned here. Right now, it’s us. The least-bad outcome is that in due course that someone will be Kim Jong-un.

 

 

Even without Senate ratification, Congress still gets a vote. It could move more sanctions legislation, including the bipartisan BRINK Act and its House companion, the Otto Warmbier Nuclear Sanctions Act. The President would be hard-pressed to veto new sanctions, given the veto-proof margins in the House and Senate for the last North Korea sanctions bill, and given the position Trump had previously staked out. This is an issue where even Republicans seem perfectly prepared to oppose Trump in an election year.

It’s not just Republicans, either. Democrat Brendan Boyle, who represents a moderate swing district on the outskirts of Philadelphia, recently introduced a bill, H.R. 6094, that would prohibit Trump from lifting sanctions until Kim Jong-un disarms, ends his human rights abuses, and apologizes to the family of Otto Warmbier. Even if this bill is unlikely to pass, it still signals Congress’s mood and appetite to challenge the President.

Then, there is the matter of the North Korean Human Rights Reauthorization Act, which now sits on the President’s desk due to the unhappy coincidence of the Senate delaying its passage and allowing it to lapse so many months after the House passed it. Now that both houses have passed the bill, Trump has ten days from June 27th to sign the bill, or it becomes law.1 Signing the bill will surely draw paroxysms of rage from Pyongyang. Vetoing it would be an act of futility, given its unanimous passage. It would draw paroxysms of rage from me, but more significantly, from Congress. Nor will a Republican Congress appropriate funds for any of the aid or other benefits Pyongyang is certain to demand. It could also punish him by holding up nominations.

Of course, if Congress did that, the usual suspects on the extreme left and the extreme right would blame it for blowing up the deal, but we call these people “extreme” because few voters listen to them. By now, most people have read the many reports of North Korea’s cheating and can see how it fits Pyongyang’s established historical pattern. Pyongyang’s words also match its actions. Its state media mouthpieces are making it clear enough that it has no intention of denuclearizing.

Pyongyang, May 24 (KCNA) — Choe Son Hui, vice-minister of Foreign Affairs of the DPRK, issued the following press statement on Thursday:

At an interview with Fox News on May 21, U.S. Vice-President Pence made unbridled and impudent remarks that north Korea might end like Libya, military option for north Korea never came off the table, the U.S. needs complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization, and so on.

As a person involved in the U.S. affairs, I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks gushing out from the mouth of the U.S. vice-president.

If he is vice-president of “single superpower” as is in name, it will be proper for him to know even a little bit about the current state of global affairs and to sense to a certain degree the trends in dialogue and the climate of détente.

We could surmise more than enough what a political dummy he is as he is trying to compare the DPRK, a nuclear weapon state, to Libya that had simply installed a few items of equipment and fiddled around with them.

Note how quick they are to pick up on the Twitter talking points of “nonproliferation” experts here.

Soon after the White House National Security Adviser Bolton made the reckless remarks, Vice-President Pence has again spat out nonsense that the DPRK would follow in Libya’s footstep. It is to be underlined, however, that in order not to follow in Libya’s footstep, we paid a heavy price to build up our powerful and reliable strength that can defend ourselves and safeguard peace and security in the Korean peninsula and the region.

In view of the remarks of the U.S. high-ranking politicians who have not yet woken up to this stark reality and compare the DPRK to Libya that met a tragic fate, I come to think that they know too little about us.

To borrow their words, we can also make the U.S. taste an appalling tragedy it has neither experienced nor even imagined up to now.

They may be bluffing, but they sound very confident about their negotiating position.

Before making such reckless threatening remarks without knowing exactly who he is facing, Pence should have seriously considered the terrible consequences of his words.

It is the U.S. who has asked for dialogue, but now it is misleading the public opinion as if we have invited them to sit with us. I only wonder what is the ulterior motive behind its move and what is it the U.S. has calculated to gain from that.

We will neither beg the U.S. for dialogue nor take the trouble to persuade them if they do not want to sit together with us.

Whether the U.S. will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behavior of the United States.

In case the U.S. offends against our goodwill and clings to unlawful and outrageous acts, I will put forward a suggestion to our supreme leadership for reconsidering the DPRK-U.S. summit. -0-

Pyongyang perceives that Trump prizes his deal with Kim for domestic purposes, just as Moon Jae-in prizes his. Pyongyang senses that by declaring it in default, Trump would have to sacrifice a domestic political victory and an example of what he claims as his personal diplomatic and negotiating prowess. It has used this trick to reel in two generations of U.S. and South Korean interlocutors. On what basis should it believe that Trump is unlike the rest of them, given the ease with which he gave concessions for vague promises, and gratuitously legitimized a tyrant a U.N. Commission of Inquiry has accused of crimes against humanity?

By now, despite the early phase of negotiations that both Pompeo and Kim clearly intend to drag out over years, it’s clear that Trump, for all his claimed prowess as a negotiator, got rolled—that is, he personally and individually got rolled. That’s quite an underachievement for someone who so recently irritated our European allies by unilaterally withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran after calling it the “worst deal ever.”

Now, I happen to be one who thinks that the JCPOA was flawed—specifically with regard to its limited inspection provisions and its sunset clause. I also happen to believe that when the President of the United States gives his word, and when the U.S. Congress gives that agreement de facto ratification, a subsequent President withdraws from any such agreement at the peril of America’s national credibility. Rather than blow up the JCPOA in the clumsy way that Trump did, I would have sought to renegotiate these more troubling terms.

But whatever one says about the JCPOA, its text, details, and timetables were models of clarity, specificity, and accountability compared to Trump-Kim, which looks to have been drawn on a bar napkin the night before the meeting … and on a bar napkin in Pyongyang, at that. For all its flaws, the JCPOA makes Trump-Kim look like the Louisiana Purchase. So does Clinton’s Agreed Framework I. So does Bush’s Agreed Framework II. I’ll go further: Trump-Kim is the worst fleecing of a New York landlord since the chief of the Lenape Indians sold Manhattan to the Dutch for $24.

For the last year, I’ve struggled to separate my views about Trump, his other policies, his language, and his personal conduct from my analysis of his North Korea policy. I’ve eschewed the tribalism that aligns for or against Trump’s policies simply because they’re Trump’s. God knows, the last thing this country needs now is another tedious political blog about him. But in a single stroke, Trump did possibly irreparable damage to one of the few policies he was getting mostly right. That stroke halved the legal, financial, diplomatic, and moral leverage the U.S. had begun building since the 11th hour of the Obama administration, and that still had a chance to yield a verifiable negotiated disarmament, a coup d’etat, or a coup d’etat leading to a verifiable negotiated disarmament. Trump’s forfeiture of that leverage—with the generous assistance of Moon Jae-in and what appear to be some very committed Pyongyang sympathizers in his cabinet—brings us closer to war, not further from it.

Either a war or a quiet capitulation garlanded by addlebrained journalists and academics will end badly enough for us, for the 28,500 troops we have not yet extricated from Korea, and for their families. For Koreans, the Trump-Kim Pact is on course to become a historically determinative catastrophe. The sooner Trump’s cabinet convinces him that Pyongyang is reneging and making him look like a sucker and a weakling, the better off we’ll all be. Not that diplomacy itself is a bad idea, of course, but the grotesque way in which we conducted it—and larded praise on, and thus legitimized and emboldened, the most brutal despot of our time—certainly was.

Wars start when evil men are emboldened. Good diplomacy, by contrast, uses every tool of national power to check and restrain evil men, and to compel them to make difficult choices between alternative forms of change. That requires careful preparation that Trump rejected on impulse, a moral stature that Trump could not wield, and the exertion of pressure that Trump never allowed to build until Kim faced a difficult choice between his nukes and his life.

I know plenty of decent, intelligent, patriotic people who serve this President faithfully and quietly. I have nothing but the deepest of appreciation for those who make the difficult, patriotic, and unenviable choice to serve a difficult President. If this blog can help them do their jobs and help them help the President by steering him in wiser directions, so much the better. But that is only the case if they can still protect him from himself, and us from him, and only if there is still time. If only our Government-of-One would listen to them.

 

1 Previously indicated that not signing would result in a pocket veto, but because Congress is in session, it would actually become law.

1 Response

  1. We have all been saying this (far less coherently and carefully) for some time. I was immediately appalled after Singapore for exactly these perfectly clarified reasons. I remain horrified. As usual, you summarize a world’s worth of angst and analysis with the clarity of a honed razor blade.