Singapore Swing and a Miss

The first half of 2018 has been filled with optimism about the trajectory of the Korean Peninsula. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's New Year’s Day address this year gave South Korean President Moon Jae-in an opening: Kim had expressed interest in participating in the Winter Olympics. Moon took that opening and ran with it, initiating a process that flung the Peninsula toward a period of sudden rapprochement, culminating first in the April 27 summit between Kim and Moon, the third inter-Korean summit meeting, and, on June 12, the historic first-ever meeting between a U.S. president and a North Korean leader.

Months earlier, U.S. President Donald J. Trump had threatened Kim Jong Un, whom he called a “rocket man,” with total destruction before world leaders gathered at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. On June 12 in Singapore, Trump shook Kim’s hand multiple times and the two of them managed to conclude a short joint statement.

This diplomacy was punctuated by carefully calculated moves by North Korea, not least of which included the announcements on April 20 by Kim, delivered to the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, that the country would dismantle its lone nuclear test site at Punggye-ri and stop testing intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

North Korea is known for a long list of provocations, which in 2017 alone included more than 20 ballistic missile tests and the use of a proscribed chemical nerve agent to kill Kim’s half-brother in Malaysia, but nuclear- and ICBM-testing are among the biggest provocations the North offered last year. North Korea followed through with its pledge to dismantle the nuclear test site, which it invited journalists but not technical experts to observe, and has so far held to its self-imposed moratorium on ICBM testing. (It has yet to flight-test any ballistic missile in 2018.)

The blur of quick-moving diplomacy on the Peninsula — and the ups and downs leading up to the summit, which included, for a brief moment, the meeting's total cancellation — created perhaps the most unusual conditions for the historic June 12 meeting. An experienced team of technically informed U.S. negotiators entered the fray at the eleventh hour, scrambling to find Trump a passable agenda and joint statement for Singapore. North Korea, meanwhile, made its intentions on “denuclearization” crystal clear in the lead up to the summit.

Slamming John Bolton, Trump’s hard-nosed national security adviser, Kim Kye Gwan, North Korea’s first vice-minister of foreign affairs, made clear his country’s position: “if the U.S. is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but reconsider our proceeding to the DPRK-U.S. summit.”

Apparently that was acceptable to the U.S. side, which nevertheless continued to publicly insist on North Korea’s total disarming. The agreement that did emerge in Singapore saw both countries publicly assent to four operative clauses, each of which contained something that both had managed to agree to at some point in the past. It makes sense for these summits and diplomatic processes to build on foundations that already exist, but for the Singapore declaration to not go a step further should stand as a disappointing result for the United States.

First they vowed to “establish new U.S.-DPRK relations in accordance with the desire of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity.” Unspecified was the question of whether this would mean diplomatic normalization between the two countries, a long-sought North Korean objective and one that Washington has been unwilling to stomach without the country's total nuclear disarmament. Previous agreements between the two, including the 1994 Agreed Framework, and at least two other joint statements included similar language as well.

The second outcome of the Singapore summit was for the two countries to “join their efforts to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.” For South Korean President Moon Jae-in, this may have been the most significant bit of the Singapore declaration as it gave considerable ballast to the April 27 Panmunjom declaration, which saw both Koreas embark on rapprochement that could be game-changing. But in the context of the United States and North Korea, these sorts of aspirations have been a common component of statements dating back to at least 2000. The Singapore summit, however, is the first time the two countries have reiterated this objective since at least 2007.

The third operative clause of the Singapore joint statement was the one to receive the most scrutiny in the American press, as it referenced “denuclearization.” This was where Trump was supposed to turn on the deal-making magic and extract from North Korea a commitment that would dazzle nonproliferation experts (most of whom had set their expectations for the summit adequately low). The final result was underwhelming. North Korea went no further than what it committed to jointly with South Korea in April. It pledged to work “toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

Days after the summit, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo implied to reporters that the phrase “complete denuclearization” included within it a North Korean understanding of the two other terms that have accompanied it, in U.S. policymaking circles, since at least in the early 2000s: “verifiable and irreversible.” But these were nowhere to be found in the text of the agreement and, as Kim Kye Gwan had said in May to Bolton's remarks, “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization” was something North Korea simply wasn't interested in.

A fourth outcome of the summit has received relatively little attention in the aftermath, but marks a welcome return to a bilateral confidence-building practice that the two countries engaged in regularly from the mid-1990s to 2005. The two sides committed “to recovering POW/MIA remains, including the immediate repatriation of those already identified.”

The statement wasn't the sum total of the outcomes, however. At a press conference following the signing of the statement with Kim, Trump announced that he’d agreed to suspend U.S. military exercises with South Korea, without specifying a scope or duration. He additionally outlined that North Korea had agreed to dismantle a “missile engine test site,” though no evidence of such a dismantling was apparent as this issue of The Diplomat went to print. The decision to suspend military exercises has long been an important North Korean ask; the unilateral concession is a major one, but may in the short term keep Washington and Pyongyang on good terms.

Zooming out, what do these outcomes of the summit mean and where do we head next? Neither North Korea nor the United States managed to cross a high bar with this summit; Kim no doubt benefited from the legitimacy-conferring pageantry associated with a summit with a U.S. president, but his country remains under multilateral sanctions that are unlikely to be lifted anytime soon. The summit does, however, mark an end to the Trump administration's “maximum pressure” policy's efficacy. While the policy had proven successful in getting other Asian states, and even China, to improve their enforcement of existing UN Security Council sanctions resolutions, those incentives have evaporated as North Korea seeks to normalize itself as an international diplomatic actor.

Meanwhile, there's no telling whether the Singapore process will stave off talk of conflict for a period of weeks, months, or perhaps years. An immediate danger is that Trump, who flew back to the United States touting that North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat, will eventually figure out that Kim Jong Un has no intention of giving up his nuclear weapons. When that moment comes, will the reaction be to turn toward sober acceptance of a nuclear North Korea or, more likely, renewed momentum toward military action?

The saving grace, however, may continue to be the inter-Korean process. Moon Jae-in is not free to do as he pleases with North Korea given that South Korea too has obligations under UN sanctions, but his plans to sustain a period of rapprochement with Kim deserve a chance. Amid everything else this year, North Korea has announced a “new strategic line,” making economic betterment a top national priority. Moon’s government has taken note and is trying to use this to the advantage of sustaining an inter-Korean peace process.

Finally, the hard work will begin now for Washington and Pyongyang. Pompeo will lead subsequent rounds of bilateral engagement as the two sides attempt to take what was announced in Singapore and convert it toward real deliverables. It’s in this process that the truth of what was achieved in Singapore will make itself apparent. For the pessimist aware of the long history of failed diplomacy between these two countries, there’s no shortage of landmines to bring both sides to an impasse. But for the optimists, sustained diplomacy continues to be an outcome favorable to war. For now, it still looks like everyone’s talking.