On March 8, Kim Jong-un announced through South Korean diplomats that he wanted to talk to Donald Trump. The offer passed through South Korea, and Trump accepted it immediately. He did not uphold any preconditions, or add new ones, or even take any steps to make sure the offer was genuine. He just took it and ran with it. Then his staff had to spend the next two days hemming-and-hawing about whether or not an offer for a DPRK-US summit had even been made, or if Trump had actually accepted it. From the looks of things, Trump certainly wants to do it and soon. To say this man’s “shoot from the mouth” style is serving him and us poorly again really does not illustrate anything. There is a reason the US has never held presidential summits with North Korea before. It takes a long time to prepare a high level diplomatic meeting, and Trump no longer has the staff he needs for that. Hundreds of American diplomats and staff have quit since January 2017. The most experienced North Korea expert in the US State Department Joseph Yun retired right before the offer came in, and new people have not been applying to jobs in the State department. Without the advice Department of States staff would give, the North Koreans will be able to manipulate Trump very easily, and so avoid giving anything up in exchange for a prestigious meeting.
The United States needs to coordinate very closely with Seoul during the planning stages, which would normally require an ambassador. According to the Wall Street Journal, when the South Korean envoys started to explain the DPRK invitation, Trump cut them off. “The South Korean Officials looked at each other as if in disbelief, according to a White House official with knowledge of the meeting.” The South Koreans did not have a chance to actually talk about the invitation, or anything else. Trump never consulted the State Departments or his advisors, and even fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who will be replaced by Mike Pompeo. Worse, Trump is already in a fight with South Korea over trade, and threatened to remove American military assets over it. And Trump took a very long time to nominate an Ambassador to South Korea, and his nominee, Victor Cha, withdrew his own nomination in January because he could not work under the conditions Trump created. Victor Cha is an old Asia hand, and possesses considerable knowledge of Northeast Asia, American policy in the region, and local perceptions of the United States. I read Victor Cha’s essays in graduate school, and they have shaped my own views about North Korea. He would have been an excellent ambassador. But instead of him, the US has a vacancy. The fact that Trump is diplomatically blind in Korea is certainly not lost on the North Koreans. Pyongyang has wanted a presidential summit with the US for decades, but Washington has alway demanded preconditions, in particular a freeze of North Korea’s nuclear program. North Korea has never agreed to the freeze, so four previous Presidents refused a face to face with Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. Those four previous presidents refused to bend on denuclearization because they knew once North Korea had nuclear weapons, it would never give them up. North Korea has sought a presidential summit because the prestige of the event would strengthen the country’s position, and the dictator’s position in the country. The North Koreans have already made a movie about it called The Country I Saw. In this movie, an American president visits North Korea and leaves with a new sense of respect for the hermit kingdom.
Trump claims that his stated goal is to get North Korea to denuclearize. First, North Korea does not define that term the same way Washington does. Second, they will never do that. Pyongyang will not willingly give up its nuclear ambitions nor any arms it has already built. Kim Jong Un simply wants the meeting to happen, because it will make him look better. He asks, and the President of the United States comes! That’s all Pyongyang needs to get out of this summit. A fully staffed diplomatic corps, which Trump does not have, would be able to see this and use it to prepare America’s position to use Pyongyang’s goals to our favor. There would be months of preparatory meetings between career diplomats. But Trump has dispensed with all of that, and the North Koreans know it. They have seen how easily China and Saudi Arabia can bend Trump to their way of things, simply by flattering him. Barack Obama never met with Kim Jong Il or Kim Jong Un because neither would meet the preconditions, even though Pyongyang made several offers to Obama that were identical to the one Trump received. That means Trump thinks he has already won, because the predecessor he hates beyond reason (Trump does not believe Barack Obama was born in the United States) did not do this. But Barack Obama did do this, with Iran. Sort of. Iran’s nuclear program is inactive. This is verifiably true according to the International Atomic Energy Agency and the US Department of State. And yet, Obama got barely any credit for that breakthrough. One fewer problem for the Middle East would be a good thing. North Korea is different. The Iranian’s never developed nuclear bombs, so suspending development does not weaken them, and Tehran’s preferred foreign policy is to be a normal state. For North Korea everything is about regime survival. Kim Jong Un can suspend weapons testing long enough for a summit, and then resume it whenever he wants. His father did this.
Dialogue between the US and the DPRK is a very good thing, or should be. Winston Churchill once said “jawing is better than warring.” But this will not be a dialogue between the US and DPRK, but a conversation between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump. Kim has no intention of leaving his regime more vulnerable, and can survive another round of fruitless talks. All he has to do is show up, and agree to nothing. Doing nothing is very easy.
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