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If the deal-maker didn’t make a deal & the peace-maker didn’t make peace, could Twitter be wrong?

DONALD TRUMP’S MOST LOYAL ADMIRERS ARE READY TO AWARD HIM A NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. These people actually believe that Agreed Framework III proves his hype about what a great deal-maker he is. Moon Jae-in’s most loyal admirers are ready to award him a Nobel Peace Prize. These people actually believe that the Panmunjom Summit proves his hype about what a great peace-maker he is. It often seems that everyone on Twitter but me belongs to one of these tribes, which despite their temporary tactical alliance, generally hold each other in contempt. Each tribe can be right in its appraisal of the other, but they’re both wrong about Singapore and Panmunjom. I’ve been observing both Pyongyang and human nature long enough to know better. Not that I needed to wait to see events validate my skepticism yet again, but they have.

This year, too many academically intelligent people fawned over Moon’s anti-anti-North Korean policies with all the objectivity of KCNA covering Kim Jong-un’s on-the-spot inspection of a llama farm. But maybe the bloom is finally off the rose. Even I thought this was a bit harsh:

My policy on Mr. Trump is to praise what he does right and criticize what he does wrong. (If Mr. Moon ever does anything right, I’ll praise him, too). Occasionally, readers suggest to me that Trump’s performance in Singapore must be part of some unknowable grand master plan. I wasn’t built to elevate faith over evidence, and the evidence shows that except as domestic P.R. stunts, Singapore isn’t working for us, Panmunjom isn’t working for South Koreans, and both are working superbly for Kim Jong-un.

No, Trump can’t lift statutory sanctions unilaterally for legal and political reasons, but he has given Kim Jong-un passive sanctions relief by not enforcing them, or by enforcing them only against low-priority targets.1 Kim also won Trump’s silence on human rights, an indefinite pause in defensive military exercises, and the growing split with South Korea this is sure to engender when Trump decides to restart them. Worst of all, Trump legitimized Kim Jong-un domestically at a time when the rot had reached Pyongyang’s diplomats, its vetted expat workers, the children of its elites, its most elite military units along the DMZ, and even officials in its intelligence agencies.

But in institutions and agencies, continuity bias has a remarkable … continuity. So do groupthink and clientitis. How else can one explain the persistence of the idea – so often and so thoroughly discredited by events – that Kim Jong-(blank) can finally open up and reform now that (blank) has happened? Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo are only the latest politicians to drink this snake wine, which may soon surpass android phones as South Korea’s largest export. Having watched North Korea policy over the last three presidencies, what stands out is the remarkable bipartisan continuity of our errors, and how consistently those errors tend to align with whatever policy South Korea’s current government prefers.

Agreed Framework III was no model of clarity, but neither was Agreed Framework I, Agreed Framework II, or the Leap Day Deal, for which there wasn’t even a written text released. In Agreed Framework III, His Porcine Majesty “reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” Pyongyang has certainly said plenty of other things to contradict this before and since, but no literate person of common sense can reconcile those words with the idea that Kim Jong-un would be free to go home and accelerate his nuclear and missile programs.

If the inviolable rule of diplomacy with Pyongyang is that Pyongyang is never true to its promises but eternally true to its demands, a corollary is that Pyongyang’s op-ed apologists rarely acknowledge that it has reneged. A few contortionists even argue that Agreed Framework III wasn’t a deal at all. The left’s version argues this to deny that Pyongyang is reneging again; the right’s version argues this to deny that the Great Deal-Maker gave away too much. Fine, then. If Pyongyang is free to nuke up faster than ever, are we free to give Thae Yong-ho and Park Sang-hak their own talk radio shows and broadcast them into North Korea? Can we go hot with those sanctions designations Trump held up last May? Whether Agreed Framework III was a deal or wasn’t a deal, why are we the only ones bound by it?

In 2002, defenders of Agreed Framework I wanted us to keep shipping fuel oil to Kim Jong-il despite the uranium program that they first denied, then minimized. Now, defenders of Agreed Framework III urge us to waste years that we no longer have on this new charade. My view of talks with Pyongyang had long been, “Talk all you want; just don’t pay,” but I have to admit that proponents of talks are talking me out of even this. They ask what the harm is in talking. Do they realize the extent to which they’re answering their own question?

For all the academic brightness of Moon Jae-in’s foreign admirers, I still expect Trump and his admirers to get wise before they do. Trump’s admirers won’t change their minds before Trump himself swings back the other way — and hard — they’ll just lose interest. The errors of Moon’s admirers are harder to excuse, easier to explain, and for most of them, impossible to dislodge with any amount of evidence. They’re harder to excuse because many of them are academics and journalists who are supposed to be smart, sophisticated, critical thinkers. They’re easier to explain because intelligence is worse than useless when it becomes a talent for deception (starting with self-deception) that one’s views are based on superior reason, rather than emotional predisposition. Understand that conceit and you understand much of what ails academia and journalism. Where else in this world can one not only evade the hard consequences and empirical measurements of misjudgment, but make a career of it?

Just as Trump’s not-a-deal isn’t disarming Pyongyang, Moon’s deal isn’t making peace. Whenever Pyongyang negotiates with submissive governments in Seoul, it always promises to take their money and to defer reform and disarmament indefinitely. If you can call the sort of negotiation Moon did here diplomacy – “capitulation” is also a form of diplomacy – Pyongyang has been good for its word. In his meeting with Kim at Panmunjom, Moon made only pro-forma demands for denuclearization. Kim promised and delivered no concessions of material value. In exchange, he got a massive propaganda boost in South Korea and among the gullible hive of foreign journalists posted there. He probably also got agreements to undermine some UN sanctions openly and violate others quietly. Kim is now making significant progress toward the unilateral disarmament of South Korea and the splitting of the U.S.-ROK alliance, a possibility that the left-of-center commentariat had so recently scoffed at. Ceding a “peace zone” to joint North Korean control will put Kim’s knife to the throat of South Korea’s most vital air and sea corridor. Moon’s slow-walking of missile defense has left South Korean cities, and the U.S. bases that deter a North Korean strike against them, more vulnerable.

Because I have a predictive model of Pyongyang’s goals that explains its demands and abandons false hopes that it intends to disarm or reform, I’m never surprised when the same old false hopes are deflated again. It should not surprise us that Moon Jae-in, with his long history of anti-anti-North Korean views and his cabal of pro-Pyongyang cohorts, peddles them still. It should surprise us, at least slightly, to see our own President trade away our security for those false hopes and a photo op with one of the vilest human beings who has ever lived. Those who handle venomous serpents out of faith in the supernatural – after all the bite marks, swollen limbs and occasional fatalities – make themselves legitimate objects of ridicule. It is the citizen’s right and duty to laugh at any pastor, Ph.D, or president who counsels us to take up and caress venomous serpents.

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1. OFAC designated more Russian shipping targets yesterday for smuggling on North Korea’s behalf. It was the third round of designations since Agreed Framework III. As shipping targets go, they were good targets, but Treasury continues to pull its punches where it really matters — against the banks that hold Kim Jong-un’s cash.

2 Responses

  2. Maybe Trump should ask for the USS Pueblo back. It is ours after all. Granted, strategically it is meaningless, but there would be PR value in it.