Will Trump Give Away Too Much to North Korea—and Get Too Little?

Kim Jongun Donald Trump
Since their meeting in Singapore, in June, President Trump has repeatedly gushed about his chemistry with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.Photograph from Getty

General Dwight Eisenhower, a strategic mastermind who commanded three million troops during the Second World War, won the Presidency, in 1952, largely because of his dramatic pledge to end the gruelling Korean War. He vowed to personally visit the Korean Peninsula, where tens of thousands of Americans had died in the conflict, before taking office. After he won, he did. The problem, as Eisenhower discovered within a month of moving into the White House, was how to achieve that peace. Fighting was at a stalemate; two years of peace talks were going nowhere. In frustration, Eisenhower decided, in May, 1953, that “it might be cheaper, dollarwise, to use atomic weapons in Korea than to continue to use conventional weapons against the dugouts which honeycombed the hills” where North Korean troops were deployed, according to declassified records of National Security Council meetings. Eisenhower then transmitted a secret warning to North Korea—as well as to China—that the United States was prepared to use the bomb if they didn’t return to peace talks.

They did. The negotiations proved to be the longest armistice talks in history. In the end, however, the three parties—North Korea and China on one side, the U.S.-led United Nations Command on the other—agreed only to a truce. Eleven American Presidents later, Donald Trump faces the challenge of brokering a formal peace when he sits down this week, in Hanoi, for his second summit with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. But, this time, North Korea is no longer a war-ravaged young nation with limited military resources.

The task for Trump, who has limited diplomatic acumen, is to generate progress on all four goals outlined in the vague two-page joint statement that came out of the first Trump-Kim summit, in June, in Singapore. The first goal is bettering relations. The second is “a lasting and stable” peace to end the Korean War. Coming in third, notably, is denuclearization. The fourth is the recovery and return of the remains of more than five thousand Americans missing in action from the war.

Trump’s own spy chiefs don’t seem optimistic. “We continue to observe activity inconsistent with full denuclearization,” the intelligence community’s new Worldwide Threat Assessment concluded last month. “The regime is committed to developing a long-range nuclear-armed missile that would pose a direct threat to the United States,” Gina Haspel, the director of the C.I.A., said in a briefing on the assessment for the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Over the past year, Pyongyang has produced enough new fuel to add seven bombs to its nuclear arsenal, Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Coöperation reported last month. It already had between thirty and sixty bombs. In 2018, it issued an order to mass-produce nuclear weapons.

No tangible diplomatic progress has been made since the meeting in Singapore. The momentum in behind-the-scenes talks stalled until a few weeks ago, U.S. officials told me. Despite its pledges, North Korea has not provided a full list of its arsenal, which has been a major goal of U.S. diplomacy, for three decades, under five Presidents. U.S. intelligence believes that the North has several covert facilities, some buried deep in mountain tunnels, that have not been identified—and that Pyongyang may be reluctant to disclose.

A senior Administration official involved in the diplomacy acknowledged the uncertainties at a White House press briefing this past Thursday. “I don’t know if North Korea has made the choice yet to denuclearize,” he said.

Since Singapore, though, Trump has repeatedly gushed about his chemistry with Kim and their exchange of “beautiful” letters. “We fell in love,” he pronounced, in September. But lately, the President has tried to dampen expectations of an imminent breakthrough. Last week, Trump said he was in “no rush” to reach a deal.

In Washington, skepticism is widespread among Republicans and Democrats in Congress, as well as from experts on the region. “I’m pessimistic because Trump keeps undercutting his negotiators and his own leverage with his ‘no rush’ rhetoric and his insistence that the suspension of testing is all that matters,” Alexander (Sandy) Vershbow, a former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea and Assistant Secretary of Defense, told me. “So the North Koreans keep producing fissile material, manufacture more bombs and ballistic missiles to point at us, South Korea, and Japan, and become recognized de facto as a nuclear-weapons state, while Trump oversells his meagre achievements, as he did at Singapore,” he said.

Eight months after the first summit, the two countries have not even defined what “denuclearization” means. They’re “still at the starting point of the lengthy and arduous process,” Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, in Washington, told me. “Trump cannot afford to squander the time spent getting to this point and come away with just pictures and pleasantries with Kim. This summit can and must emphasize substance over pageantry.”

U.S. experts fear that the President could give up too much in exchange for too little. “The Trump Administration has been hinting that it is lowering the bar on several previous North Korea policy positions,” Bruce Klingner, the former C.I.A. deputy division chief for Korea, who is now at the Heritage Foundation, told me.

For the United States, denuclearization has historically meant giving up all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, as well as ballistic missiles. In diplomatic-speak, it is defined as “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization” or “C.V.I.D.” That includes destroying all stockpiles, dismantling all production sites, conducting intrusive and ongoing inspections, ending proliferation by sharing technology or weapons with other countries, and abandoning any research facilities that might give Pyongyang a future capacity.

“Chances that North Koreans will give up their stockpiles are slim,” Bill Richardson, the former U.N. Ambassador, who has made several trips to negotiate with Pyongyang, told me. “So we need to be clear about what denuclearization means.”

North Korea has nuclear weapons largely because it took Eisenhower’s warning seriously—and has had a deep-seated fear of the American nuclear capacity ever since. After Eisenhower took office, with help from the Soviet Union, North Korea began building a nuclear program to deter a future U.S. attack. The bomb has become the insurance that the Kim dynasty, now in its third generation, will survive. For North Korea, denuclearization means that the United States pledges not to use military force against the North, ends the war, lifts punitive economic sanctions, and withdraws its nearly thirty-thousand forces from South Korea.

The gap remains wide on all four issues. “In December, Pyongyang directly rebuked [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo for claiming that the regime had accepted the C.V.I.D. concept,” Klingner told me. And, at the White House briefing, two senior Administration officials were adamant that the withdrawal of U.S forces from South Korea was not currently on the table.

The White House insists, though, that Trump wants a breakthrough in Hanoi. “We actually need to move very quickly in this process, and I think we need to move in very big bites,” the senior Administration official said at the briefing. “So we are not looking to have incremental steps.”

The hope, however elusive, is that the summit will at least produce a roadmap “with milestones for verifiable denuclearization in tandem with progress on the other three goals,” Vershbow told me. Kimball said that the most tangible and attainable interim steps would be “the verifiable decommissioning of the Yongbyon nuclear complex, where the bulk of North Korea’s nuclear-weapons material-production infrastructure is located, in exchange for a political declaration on the end of the war, with perhaps limited sanctions relief that would facilitate North-South tourism and trade coöperation.”

Richardson said that the Hanoi summit, to be considered successful, will have to produce what the Singapore summit failed to achieve: “a signed framework for negotiations—timelines, terms of reference, and routine schedule of summits. Short of that, negotiations will fizzle again until the next summit is announced.” To get a deal, Richardson added, the President may need to set up additional meetings with Kim “every three to four months.”

On Sunday, Pompeo hinted that Trump might be willing to extend his stay in Hanoi if needed. “I’m confident that if it requires even more time, we’ll commit to that,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” The summit, currently scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, now includes a one-on-one session between the two leaders, a working lunch, and expanded meetings with their teams.

In the end, Klingner said, the principal determinant will be “how far the President moves away from previous firm stances in his eagerness for an agreement. At this point, the U.S. position is in greater flux than that of North Korea.”