Trump and North Korea: Great Expectations

In mid-May 2018, a White House reporter tweeted out a photograph of a commemorative “challenge coin” the White House Military Office had commissioned for the historic summit between U.S. President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. If anything captured the Trump administration's great expectations for the historic meeting – then scheduled for June 12 in Singapore – the coin was it.

It may seem silly to fixate on what’s little more than an executive branch trinket, but the coin captured so much of what was unsettling about the way in which the current U.S. administration approached the latest bout of diplomacy between Washington and Pyongyang. The top of the coin was emblazoned with the words “peace talks,” suggesting a far grander agenda for the Singapore meeting than the comparably narrower objective of “denuclearization” often heard from administration officials.

“Peace” with North Korea would entail, presumably, diplomatic normalization – something that Kim Jong-un, and his father and grandfather before him, have long sought. And speaking of what Kim wants, the coin offers North Korea considerable status as a sovereign state equal in every respect to the United States.

In the center of the coin, Trump and Kim stare into each other’s eyes, standing before side-by-side U.S. and North Korean flags. For a leader that seeks to meet the president of the United States as the leader of an equal nuclear power, Kim could do worse – he went from “rocket man” in 2017 to, well, the “supreme leader” of the “Democratic People's Republic of Korea,” according to this White House trinket.

But even with the commemorative coins minted, it was far from clear that the U.S. administration was taking the upcoming summit anywhere nearly as seriously as the North Korean regime appeared to be. For Trump, the pageantry and historicity of the summit are all that matter. Details on what North Korea means by “denuclearization” were secondary ever since he accepted Kim's invitation to meet, back in early March.

The fractures appeared early, making Trump’s ultimate decision in late May to cancel the summit far from surprising. North Korea lashed out at comments by U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton calling for a maximalist “denuclearization” solution, meaning a summit meeting where Kim Jong-un would have turned up to turn over the keys to his nuclear program to Donald Trump unilaterally and received sanctions relief for nothing less than total capitulation. This “Libya model,” for Bolton, was the only acceptable way to deal with North Korea's nuclear – and chemical and biological – weapons.

Not only did North Korea lash out at Bolton's talk of a “Libya model,” but it also strongly condemned plans by the United States and South Korea to go ahead with the 2018 iteration of their Max Thunder aerial military exercises.

Pyongyang caught wind that there were plans to involve B-52 Stratofortress nuclear-capable bombers – what North Korea calls “strategic assets.” North Korea sees these kinds of exercises involving nuclear-capable U.S. assets as immensely threatening and as a ruse for an attack. The alliance managed to cancel the B-52 exercise, but not before the damage had already been done.

To compound the issue, days after North Korea's reaction to the exercise and to Bolton's comments, Trump, in off-the-cuff remarks, made matters much worse. Conflating Bolton's “Libya model” referring to the 2003 disarmament process with the 2011 intervention in the country led by the Obama administration, Trump effectively threatened North Korea: “The Libya model isn’t the model that we have at all when we’re thinking of North Korea,” Trump said. “In Libya, we decimated that country.”

Trump added that “that model would take place if we don’t make a deal [with North Korea], most likely,” leaving Kim Jong-un with precisely the kind of threat that North Korea hears when it imagines the “Libya model.” (The country's leader, Muammar Gaddafi, ended up killed by rebels some eight years after disarming.)

Since the successful inter-Korean summit on April 27, North Korea has seen more reasons than not to avoid taking the risk of showing up to Singapore on June 12 for the meeting with Trump. Yes, a photo-op with a U.S. president would have been a boon for Kim, but he'd assume considerable risk traveling that far from home for a meeting with a U.S. president who appears unwilling to settle for anything but North Korea's total capitulation.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, had set expectations high for the summit. Even as many Korea-watchers, including this author, favored diplomacy as the least-bad of all options for the United States in 2017, there was something unsettling about Trump entering a meeting with Kim with such high expectations. What would happen when Trump arrived in Singapore, met Kim, and realized that North Korea had no intention of denuclearizing?

Not only would Trump find his hopes of winning a Nobel Peace Prize evaporated, but he might end up angry and embarrassed. If he chose to blame South Korea and President Moon Jae-in for leading him on, then the U.S.-South Korea alliance would suffer – though that appears to be the case with the cancellation anyway. Alternatively, he could turn his anger toward Kim Jong-un, raising the disturbing possibility that we pick up right where things left off in November 2017 with the test of the Hwasong-15 intercontinental-range ballistic missile and U.S. talk of a military strike.

All of this is why it was actually a welcome change of pace when Trump told reporters in late May that the summit may not happen at all on June 12. It suggested that, after weeks of soaring expectations, he had realized that North Korea had no intention of heading down the path Libya did in 2003. North Korean statements have clarified as much.

On May 24, Choe Son Hui, North Korea's vice minister of foreign affairs and one of the country's chief Americanists, released a statement through the Korean Central News Agency taking aim at comments made by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence lauding Trump's remarks on threatening to attack North Korea, per the 2011 “Libya model.”

"In view of the remarks of the U.S. high-ranking politicians who have not yet woken up to this stark reality and compare the DPRK to Libya that met a tragic fate, I come to think that they know too little about us," Choe remarked.

While North Korean propaganda is often over-the-top in its imagery, Choe's point was apt. All along, since the acceptance of the invitation from Kim to meet in Singapore, the Trump administration had been preparing for a summit with a straw-man version of North Korea: one that intended to denuclearize and one that would have been willing to accept U.S. foreign investment in exchange for nuclear capitulation.

With the summit cancelled, what’s clear is that the U.S. administration was never prepared for a high-stakes, historic meeting with Kim Jong-un. The meeting would have been the first between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader and its success or failure would have always had serious consequences for the future of Northeast Asian security.

For the United States, this kind of a presidential summit had always been envisaged as the reward for North Korean compliance with a prolonged diplomatic process resulting in a bona fide denuclearization process; the current administration, however, had chosen to take a bold leap of faith and decided to work in reverse, by using the president's facetime with Kim to initiate a process.

There won’t be a summit on June 12, but it will be critical that the administration calibrate its expectations to conform to the reality of a nuclear-armed North Korea that won't willingly disarm. Anything else will result in further attempts at diplomacy hitting a brick wall or a catastrophic lurch toward conflict.