The Rocket Man/Dotard Summit

North Korea’s suspension of nuclear and missile tests in anticipation of Kim Jung-un’s meeting with Donald Trump should surprise no one. Had the tests continued, there would have been no meeting. Kim doesn’t want that: the meeting is a big win for him, as it puts him on equal ground with the President of the United States, bolstering his legitimacy at home and abroad. In fact, there have been no tests since November, so the announcement is simply an acknowledgement of the status quo. The alleged abandonment of the nuclear test site may have been caused by geological problems there and is in any event easily reversed. Kim has given up little and gotten a lot.

Far less clear is what the US can get from this meeting. What it has sought in the past is complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization (CVID), which John Bolton in 2004 declared difficult to get. It is certainly going to be harder now, since North Korea now has the missiles and nukes it could only dream of in 2004.

Pyongyang will give up nukes if and only it believes it is getting a better guarantee of regime survival than they provide. That’s not easy to imagine, but it’s what people mean when they start talking about a formal end to the Korean war, which ceased hostilities with an armistice in 1953 but no peace treaty. A treaty ending the war would need somehow to obligate the US and its allies in South Korea and Japan not to seek an end to the extraordinarily brutal dictatorship in Pyongyang.

That would be a giant diplomatic leap from where we are now and is unlikely to be achieved in a first meeting between Presidents Trump and Kim. More likely is initiation of a new negotiating process and a continuation of some “confidence-building measures”: perhaps a pledge not to tighten sanctions, or some loosening of them on humanitarian grounds, an extension of the suspension of testing, return of some IAEA inspectors to North Korea, release of the three Americans imprisoned in the North, future talks and increased economic cooperation between North and South, release of Japanese and South Koreans that the North has abducted.

In negotiations of that sort, the devil is in the details. No one should expect Trump to handle those. The US is going to have to deploy a serious negotiating team with real experts and far more coordination than the Trump Administration usually displays. It’s amazing and reprehensible that CIA Director Pompeo’s secret visit to Pyongyang to talk with Kim over Easter weekend did not lead to the release of the imprisoned Americans, though I suppose Washington may have wanted to hold off on that in order to have a Summit deliverable. President Trump doesn’t want anyone stealing his thunder.

With a decision on the Iran nuclear deal pending before the Rocket Man/Dotard Summit, there is a real possibility Trump will wreck the prospects for any progress before the Summit convenes. Kim isn’t likely to take even modest steps toward de-nuclearization if he sees the US reneging on the painstakingly negotiated Iran deal. Why would he if Washington can’t be relied upon to keep its end of  a nuclear bargain guaranteed by Europe and Russia?

It took years to negotiate the Iran deal. It will take just as long to negotiate a serious stand down from North Korea’s nuclear status, if it is even possible. The US will need to be thinking of intermediate steps, as well as pondering how far it wants to go in giving the Kim regime the guarantees of regime survival it will want. Who knew North Korea could be so complicated?