The prospect of renewed negotiations would be more auspicious if the administration had first secured even one of the ambitious objectives it has set for itself abroad.
The prospect of renewed negotiations would be more auspicious if the administration had first secured even one of the ambitious objectives it has set for itself abroad.
F resh off its unqualified diplomatic successes with the Russians, the Iranians, and Hamas’s terrorists and their intermediaries, the Trump administration is reportedly gearing up to resolve another of the world’s seemingly intractable conundrums: North Korea and its nuclear arsenal.
According to Axios, the Trump White House is eager to restore the bonhomie the president and his counterpart in Pyongyang shared during Trump’s first term in office. “While nothing appears imminent, Trump has made clear he’d like to reconnect with Kim [Jong-un] — perhaps face-to-face — and his national security team is preparing for that scenario,” reporters Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler revealed. As one former Trump official confessed, it would only take “one flowery letter” from Kim to Trump to light a fire under a new diplomatic offensive.
It is yet unclear from this report what goals the Trump administration believes could be secured via more summitry with the North Korean despot. What’s more, it seems unlikely that the dynamic that typified U.S. engagements with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea during Trump’s first term could be restored. The North Korean nuclear program is more advanced today than it was at the end of the last decade. What’s more, according to Axios, so many of the officials who conducted those talks “have been purged or forced to undergo reeducation.” But enough about the Trump administration.
Seriously, folks: North Korea’s nuclear negotiators aren’t the only parties to that process who were subsequently exiled to the wilderness. The American architects of engagement with North Korea — principals such as John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, yes, but also career diplomats such as onetime State Department official Stephen Biegun — have no influence over the new Trump administration. The process they spearheaded produced only failure, but not the sort that Americans should mourn.
Pyongyang never had any intention of dismantling its nuclear arsenal, to say nothing of its ballistic missiles or enrichment facilities, such as the centrifuges at Yongbyon. During the last round of negotiations, North Korea sought across-the-board sanctions relief — beyond the temporary and targeted easing floated by Trump and his negotiators — in exchange for paltry and performative disarmament commitments. The last U.S.-DPRK summit, in Hanoi in 2019, ended abruptly but not unsatisfactorily if the American objective was to punish Pyongyang for its nuclear proliferation rather than to legitimize its weapons program.
The Biden administration was keen to pick up where Trump left off. “The Biden administration’s approach to North Korea was opening the door for talks anywhere, anytime, without any preconditions,” Politico recently observed. “North Korea responded by effectively ghosting them for four years. Now the problem is Trump’s.” And that problem has grown only more complex as a result, not just of Pyongyang’s growing nuclear arsenal and enrichment capacity, but also its direct support for and participation in Russian combat operations against Ukraine’s forces.
America and the West are not without leverage that might induce North Korean participation in meaningful disarmament talks. “The U.S. hasn’t stored nuclear weapons in South Korea since 1991,” RAND Corporation defense analyst Bruce Bennett recently observed. “But the facilities are still there. They haven’t been modernized. We’ve done that in Europe, but not here. Now’s the time.” Revamping those facilities, to signal a U.S. willingness to station nuclear weapons on the peninsula in the future, would be bitterly resisted by Pyongyang, but it could have a clarifying effect on the regime’s thinking.
Putting additional pressure on North Korea’s allies in Washington and Beijing would help, too. But the Trump administration is not doing that right now. In pursuit of a negotiated cease-fire in Ukraine, the administration is already ceding the pressure it might have put on the Kremlin — not that the Russian side seems inclined to reward Washington’s efforts.
Likewise, with the administration in full retreat from its global trade war, China is able to name its terms to the Trump administration. “Trump may as well be wearing a sandwich board now that says ‘will take any deal,’” Dan McLaughlin recently wrote of Trump’s “climbdown” from confrontation with the People’s Republic. “And when you’ll take anything, you’ll get nothing.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s public flirtation with a new Iranian nuclear deal that mirrors the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’s legitimization of Iranian uranium enrichment capabilities has thrilled Tehran at the expense of U.S. relations with our regional allies, including Israel. “Dismantle all the infrastructure of Iran’s nuclear program,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said. “That is a deal we can live with.” That is not, however, what Iran will accept, nor is it what the administration’s negotiators initially envisioned.
If there is appetite in the Trump administration for a new diplomatic push to denuclearize North Korea, it seems to have taken a back seat relative to the administration’s other priorities abroad. Moreover, the appetite for a new round of talks doesn’t seem to exist in Pyongyang. “The North Koreans don’t seem to have named a new special envoy for U.S. diplomacy, and they haven’t expressed interest in negotiations for a long time,” one Korea watcher told Axios. “Their position has been less negative about the prospects for negotiations lately, although they haven’t said anything positive either.”
The prospect of renewed bilateral negotiations would be more auspicious if the administration had managed to secure even one of the ambitious objectives it has set for itself abroad first. As it stands, the administration would only commit itself deeper to a folly that has frustrated all its negotiations with America’s adversaries.
If the Trump White House believes that its enemies are disunited, working at cross purposes, and easily maneuvered into conflict with one another, it will fail to achieve its goals. America’s adversaries have their disagreements, but not when it comes to their shared goal of putting an end to the age of global American dominance. The North Koreans’ nuclear arsenal is our headache, not theirs.