The hopes and fears
surrounding the second Trump-Kim summit
President Trump and North Korea’s
Kim Jong Un are due to meet in Vietnam next week for their second summit on
denuclearization. Like the first, which took place in Singapore, there will
be much pomp and circumstance: The White House is already offering fans the
chance to buy a commemorative coin.
Trump has spoken warmly of his
first summit with Kim. He has frequently claimed that Pyongyang has halted
its overt testing of missiles and nuclear weapons, and he has offered
glowing reviews of his relationship with the young North Korean leader. “We
fell in love,” Trump said at a campaign rally in September.
“He wrote me beautiful letters.”
But now we are into the Vietnamese
new year, and that romance looks complicated. Some analysts contend
circumstances have changed too much, that if the second summit is simply a
repeat of the first, it will be remembered as a failure.
Last year’s meeting, while
certainly historic, produced a communique that was extremely light on
details. There has been little real progress made on the stated goal of
denuclearization, with some moments of outright tension between Washington
and Pyongyang. The second summit, scheduled Feb. 27 to 28, will need to
flesh out the core of what denuclearization will look like — and chart a road
map for the United States and North Korea.
Duyeon Kim, an adjunct senior
fellow at the Center for a New American Security, put it this way: “The Vietnam
summit this month will determine whether real denuclearization of North
Korea is possible ever, and how much Washington is willing to pay for it,
while ensuring the regime’s survival and the country’s prosperity.”
Trump and Kim signed an agreement
that made only vague reference to nuclear weapons at the first summit in
June (with the exception of a pledge to repatriate the remains of U.S.
service members killed in the Korean War, which has seen some progress).
But after the second summit, the devil will be in the details.
Exactly what is being offered in
Vietnam will be important. Both sides will want
to have something to keep momentum going. However, they will probably
proceed cautiously, keeping incentives for future negotiations. U.S.
officials, including Stephen Biegun, the special envoy for North Korea,
have suggested that Washington views
this as a step-by-step process — a contrast to Trump’s prior assessment that
“there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”
Biegun, who was appointed after the
summit last year and initially struggled to get meetings with the North
Korean side, is known to have met with a number of domestic
denuclearization experts in recent months. One of the groups he met with is
associated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which
released benchmarks for the success of the Vietnam summit.
Among the key points outlined by Carnegie’s Toby Dalton and
Ariel Levite is that the two sides need to agree to a road map, while
North Korea should agree to a verifiable freeze on the production of
nuclear weapons along with a general increase in transparency. “As a first
step to demonstrate its sincerity and commitment to making progress, North
Korea should immediately cease all fissile material activity at Yongbyon
and open it to monitoring,” Dalton and Levite write, referring to North
Korea’s main nuclear facility.
These may be achievable goals — Kim
has already offered to dismantle Yongbyon,
though only after the United States makes its own concessions. But a big
question is: What would Washington offer in return? One obvious suggestion
is that Washington may move to pull back sanctions placed on North Korea in
recent years.
“A series of more developed issues,
compared to the first summit, will be discussed during the meeting,” Kim
Sang-ki, director of the unification policy unit at the Korea Institute for
National Unification, told the Korea Times. “They will include a
lifting of economic sanctions on the North and the expansion of bilateral
engagement in such areas as culture and sports.”
For U.S. negotiators,
one of the biggest hurdles is reading what their North Korean counterparts
are thinking. Pyongyang has been an unreliable
partner in past talks, and there are plenty who fear Trump will get conned.
“Basically, we’re giving Kim more time and money — money in the form of lax
enforcement or nonenforcement of sanctions — to perfect the bomb,” said
Sung-Yoon Lee of Tufts University in a recent interview.
Others have suggested that
sometimes what the West interprets as duplicitous is actually an
institutional hesitancy, perhaps caused by the pressure of living in a
totalitarian state. “As a general rule, North Korean negotiators proceed
cautiously, sometimes circuitously,” Robert Carlin, a former
CIA and State Department analyst, wrote for the website 38 North. “The path
to ‘yes’ tends not to come in a straight line.”
Trump may not be a predictable,
reliable negotiator, either. His timetable for denuclearization appears to
have stretched dramatically as his fondness for Kim has grown. “We’re in no
rush whatsoever,” Trump said this week of
North Korea’s denuclearization.
That kind of rhetoric may seem like
a waste of leverage, but it is also a reflection of reality: All but the
most intense hawks see the window for an immediate, unilateral disarmament
by North Korea as closed, if it were ever truly open. Even if North Korea
agreed to denuclearization, it would almost certainly take years to
complete — up to a decade, according to one plan put together by
Carlin and others.
That’s one reason critics of Trump worry he could act
impulsively and offer major concessions in a bid to reach a grand new deal
— and with it, a domestic political win. Many hope for a road map going
forward: North Korea’s nuclear weapons program may well outlast Trump’s
time in office, but the president has a real chance to chart a course for
eventual denuclearization.
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