Sociedad Asiática

Edited by Max J. Rosenthal and Ruby Mellen

BY ADAM TAYLOR

What if Trump’s deal with North Korea is a failure?

(Evan Vucci/AP)

When President Trump announces the outcome of his summit
this week with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, he is likely to
claim it as a
victory. Experts and analysts the world over will spend time
parsing
the text of the agreement, trying to determine whether any
real
progress was made on the denuclearization of North Korea and
whether Trump’s verdict is correct.

Yet, given how difficult it is to define success when it comes to
nuclear diplomacy, there may be a better way to think about it:
For Trump, what constitutes a failure?

There’s one obvious way this week’s summit could end
up a failure in the short term. The two sides may be unable
to agree to
terms on a key issue, be it sanctions relief for North Korea or Washington’s demand to allow outside nuclear inspectors
into the reclusive country. Trump or Kim would back out of talks,
and the
war of words between them would resume. North Korea might
begin testing missiles or nuclear weapons again, marking a
return to
heightened tensions. Maybe things could get worse, risking a
conflict that could kill millions.

Most experts contend that the likelihood of conflict is low,
if it exists at all. “North Korea won’t attack us if we don’t
attack them,”
said David Kang, the director of the University of Southern
California’s Korean Studies Institute. “Deterrence will hold.”
But the implosion of talks would still mean an unwelcome return to tensions after more than a year of diplomacy and progress.

This brings us to the second possibility: a failure in the medium
term. In this scenario, Trump and Kim would hammer out some
kind of deal in Hanoi, but the agreement would be flawed and
eventually collapse.

This kind of failure could hinge on relatively technical details
in the agreement, like what to do about North Korea’s Yongbyon
nuclear facility. Yongbyon is North Korea’s only known source
of plutonium and other materials necessary for making nuclear
weapons, and it is widely expected to be a key part of any deal
involving North Korea’s stockpile.
But there is a difference between simply accepting a freeze
on production and convincing Pyongyang to close and dismantle
the site.

Speaking at the Korea Economic Institute in Washington on Tuesday, Moon Chung-in, an adviser to the South Korean president and a
strong supporter of Trump’s talks, said he thought many in the
United States would balk if Trump announced he had agreed to a suspension rather than full closure. “I really don’t think that the
American people can accept just simply suspending production of
nuclear materials — fissile materials — at Yongbyon,” Moon said.

That’s just one of the details that could make an agreement dead
on arrival in the United States. Conceding too much on a technical point — or agreeing to withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea, as some
observers fear he might — would open up Trump to criticism not
just from his Democratic opponents, but from members of his own party and perhaps his administration.

In a recently released overview of prospects for U.S.-North Korea diplomacy, Catherine Killough of the Ploughshares Fund argued that “shortsighted decisions to abandon promising agreements” could often be traced to domestic concerns, including “partisanship and intraparty infighting” as well as leadership changes — battles that are commonplace in Washington.

Even if the two sides reached a good deal with solid support,
things could still go wrong in the long term. Trump and Kim could
reach an agreement in Hanoi in which North Korea agrees to real concessions on its nuclear program. High-level diplomatic relations
would presumably improve, and the United States could move to
withdraw sanctions.

However, nuclear weapons aren’t the only reason North Korea isn’t a full member of the international community. A nuclear deal would not solve Pyongyang’s long history of human rights abuses, for example —
a subject the Trump administration has largely ignored of late.

Olivia Enos, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation’s Asian studies center, told my colleague Siobhán O’Grady this week that Trump’s
failure to raise human rights issues at the Singapore Summit last
year was a “huge missed opportunity . . . to really shift Kim Jong Un’s
risk calculus and to communicate to him that he cannot be viewed as
a respected leader when he has between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners in prison camps.”

South Korean protesters and North Korean defectors take part in a rally near the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, urging the United States to discuss North Korean human rights issues at the summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam. (Lee Jin-man/AP)

That lack of attention may prove disastrous in more ways than one:
Politico noted this week that human rights abuses could lead Congress
to block Trump’s attempts to remove some sanctions on North Korea. “Because of U.S. law today, the general counsel of any U.S. company is not going to recommend going into North Korea because of human rights abuses,” Victor Cha of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told Politico.

Trump may be looking for a short-term success, but what will be more important — and much more difficult — will be to avoid a long-term failure. The president may be realizing this: he has shifted the goal posts several times in his negotiations with Kim, contradicting his own claims that there was no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea and suggesting that he was in no rush to force North Korea to give up its nukes.

But Kim the dictator is all but certain to stick around longer than Trump the term-limited president. As Duyeon Kim, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, wrote from Hanoi this week: “Time is surely on Kim’s side — he will outlast Trump and several more American presidents."

• Trump may be in Hanoi, but his mind might have been on his former lawyer Michael Cohen's public testimony in Washington on Wednesday. During a hearing of the House Oversight Committee, Cohen accused the president of lying, criminality and racism — and hinted there was more to be made public. Here are more details from The Post’s coverage:

“The man who once derived his identity from making President Trump’s problems go away turned on his former boss in stunning fashion Wednesday, alleging to Congress how the commander in chief manipulated financial records, paid to cover up extramarital affairs and reacted with glee when he learned in advance that the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy organization would release emails damaging to his political opponent.

“Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and personal lawyer, cast the president as a mendacious and petty racist who enlisted those around him in a culture of deceit. In testimony before the House Oversight Committee, Cohen revealed how, in his view, Trump broke the law even as president, and he suggested ominously that federal prosecutors in Manhattan remain interested in a case that involves the president.

“’Is there any other wrongdoing or illegal act that you are aware of regarding Donald Trump that we haven’t yet discussed today?’ Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) asked.

“’Yes, and again, those are part of the investigation that is currently being looked at by the Southern District of New York,’ Cohen responded.”

• The Post’s E.J. Dionne Jr. notes the contrast between the summit in Hanoi and the remarks made by Cohen in Washington:

“Only President Trump could use his encounter with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to reinforce some of the worst things his former lawyer Michael Cohen said about him in congressional testimony on Wednesday.

“Nothing Trump does should surprise us anymore, yet it was still shocking that the man who holds an office once associated with the words ‘leader of the free world’ would refer to a murderous dictator as 'my friend.' It’s clear by now that Trump feels closest to autocrats and is uneasy with truly democratic leaders, as Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, among others, has learned.”

• There was a further escalation of the India-Pakistan standoff we wrote about yesterday: Pakistan shot down at least one Indian Air Force jet on Wednesday (Pakistan says it downed two planes), and India confirmed one of its pilots had gone missing. Then the Pakistani government released a video of an Indian Air Force officer it claimed was the missing pilot.

An expert told The Post’s Alex Horton that they believed the release of the video violated the norms outlined for prisoners in the Geneva Convention.

“Here, [there was] no military necessity to release the video, and presumably it was released with the intent to humiliate the captive and, thus, the state of India, and, thus, Pakistan is in violation of Article 13” of the convention, Rachel E. VanLandingham, a military justice expert at Southwestern Law School, told The Post.

• Many in Israel expect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be indicted on Thursday, a move that would rock the country’s political system with just over a month to go before parliamentary elections. Chaim Levinson of Haaretz writes about how the prime minister’s party is preparing for the news:

“The Likud party fears it could lose five Knesset seats once Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit announces his decision to indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pending a hearing. Party members worry that people will turn away not necessarily because of the charges themselves, but because of the uncertainty the announcement will create about Netanyahu’s political future.

"Likud has been preparing for this day for a long time, and has numerous video clips and text messages ready to explain its position. Over the past several months, the campaign has tested the effectiveness of several slogans, including ‘house of cards,’ ‘rigged cases,’ ‘bribery without money’ and ‘political persecution.’”

Elizaveta Peskova attends a meeting of bloggers organized by the Russian Parliament in 2017. (Dmitry Dukhanin/AP)

A stiletto in the door

European Union lawmakers are devoting tremendous energy to combating Russian efforts to subvert their political systems. And so finding the daughter of one of President Vladimir Putin’s top aides in their midst has come as something of a surprise.

Elizaveta Peskova, 21, the Instagram-famous daughter of Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, is interning in the office of a far-right French member of the European Parliament, Aymeric Chauprade, the lawmaker confirmed. Peskova’s father has been a key shaper of Putin’s public image during nearly the entirety of his 19-year presidency.

The arrangement has raised alarm among some members of the parliament, who said they feared the security consequences of her presence in their institution. But Chauprade dismissed “conspiratorial Russophobia” among fellow lawmakers who have condemned his decision to hire Peskova.

No European Parliament intern has access to confidential documents, nor does Chauprade himself, according to a spokeswoman for the European Parliament, Marjory van den Broeke. The European Parliament does not require its members’ interns to be E.U. citizens, nor does it conduct security or background checks beyond any done by a lawmaker, van den Broeke said.

Peskova, who often uses her Frenchified name of Lisa as she documents her luxe life on social media, is among the best known of the Kremlin children. Her Instagram account, with more than 82,000 followers, is a paean to the escapades available to Russian elite: fittings at exclusive Moscow boutiques; hugs with her father in front of Le Bristol, a Parisian temple to glamour; traditional lezginka dancing and partying alongside Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya.

But Peskova is hardly alone among children of the Kremlin elite who have made lives for themselves in countries that have issued sanctions against their parents’ cohort. And she has found herself entangled in controversy before. She has spoken out against same-sex couples adopting children. She faced allegations of plagiarizing parts of an article on education she wrote for Forbes Russia. And she was mocked for visiting a Crimean shipyard in a designer dress to promote “patriotic business.”

Chauprade said this latest controversy has been hard for his intern.

“Being raised in the Western world and at the same time being a Russian citizen, the way Russia is perceived in the world, this is difficult,” he said. — Michael Birnbaum and Amie Ferris-Rotman

For more on the tensions between Pakistan and India, the Guardian looks at the lack of international players poised to smooth over the situation. Meanwhile, The Post’s Jason Rezaian shines a light on the international importance of Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, a column in the New York Times examines a growing opposition to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Americas Quarterly take stock of Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno’s first two years in office.