Third Summit’s the Charm?

Did the United States blow its chance with North Korea? After the failure in Hanoi at the end of February, when both U.S. President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un left negotiations without a deal, that appeared to be a possible outcome.

For Kim, in particular, Hanoi was an embarrassment. The North Korean leader had come, hoping that, like in Singapore last June, he would be able to work the U.S. president toward a symbolic deal and perhaps a more-than-symbolic last minute giveaway. Last year, Trump was drawn to announce unilaterally that the then-upcoming U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises would be canceled. In Hanoi, Kim may have had similarly high hopes for significant sanctions relief.

Things didn’t play out that way. Trump said sanctions relief wouldn’t be possible – taking the advice of his hawkish advisers like John Bolton, the current U.S. national security adviser, who sees little room for relief before North Korea’s total disarmament. Of course, there was no deal to be had.

Kim went silent on the state of the U.S.-North Korea diplomatic process after Hanoi. All we had to go on to gauge how the North Korean leader himself might have felt about what transpired in Hanoi were the press conference held by the country’s foreign minister on the night of February 28, the second day of the two-day summit, and a similar press conference in Pyongyang some two weeks later, where a vice minister at the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Choe Son Hui, communicated the country’s position.

But in early April, Kim spoke – twice. He delivered two important public addresses in early April. The first was at his guidance of the 4th Plenary Meeting of the 7th Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea. The second was an address to the first session of the 14th Supreme People’s Assembly in North Korea. The latter was much more focused on foreign affairs, but it was at the first that Kim underscored an important message for his deputies and North Korea’s ruling party.

Kim told the Party’s Central Committee to hunker down and get to work on increasing economic self-reliance, “so as to deal a telling blow to the hostile forces who go with bloodshot eyes miscalculating that sanctions can bring the DPRK to its knees,” referring to the official name of his country, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. In effect, North Korea would show the United States – as it had done with its pursuit of nuclear weapons – that sanctions cannot slow its forward march.

Kim emphasized this message in greater detail during his speech to the Supreme People’s Assembly. While taking care to mention that his personal relationship with Trump remained positive, Kim chastised the United States for taking actions that were at odds with the spirit of the June 12 declaration he and Trump had signed in Singapore, including resuming major joint exercises with South Korea and, interestingly, even conducting a missile defense test against a target designed to represent an intercontinental-range ballistic missile. (The U.S. Missile Defense Agency had successfully conducted such a test on March 25.)

“The U.S. floated the idea of improved relations and peace at the negotiations and on the other hand, made desperate efforts to create the conditions for forcing the DPRK to drop arms and toppling its social system after making it run off its way through persistent application of economic sanctions,” Kim said. Ominously, the speech included no mention whatsoever of “denuclearization.”

The most important line from Kim’s address – one with the greatest bearing on the Trump administration’s last remaining chance at productive diplomacy with Pyongyang – was his acknowledgement that a third U.S.-North Korea summit could still happen, but only once the United States adopts the “correct posture.” What is that posture exactly?

For Kim, it’s a recognition that sanctions should come off given North Korea’s changed behavior from 2017. Kim suggested that without an indication of a changed temperament within the U.S. administration, even low-level working group meetings can’t resume. He signaled that he would be willing to wait until the end of 2019 before making a decision on charting an alternative course – what he hinted at in his New Year’s Day speech this year.

What exactly should all this mean for U.S. policy toward the Korean Peninsula? For the Trump administration, there’s little wisdom to be found in Kim Jong Un’s public statements, it would seem. These April addresses were far from novel in their core message. In fact, the day after the Singapore summit last June, North Korean statements underscored that sanctions relief would be a key demand for Pyongyang.

In the weeks since Hanoi, senior administration officials – notably, Bolton and Stephen Biegun, the U.S. special representative for diplomacy with North Korea – have ruled out any prospects for a step-by-step approach to diplomacy. Insofar as the issue of North Korea’s disarmament is concerned, the administration continues to take an all-or-nothing approach. Hanoi underscored that in asking for all-or-nothing, the administration is likely to walk away from the table with nothing.

A lot can happen by the end of 2019, of course, but it’ll likely be North Korea taking the initiative. Kim’s outreach to Russia has grown in the weeks since the Hanoi summit. The North Korean leader has strong incentives to expand his options, leveraging one great power off another just as his grandfather had done during the Cold War. Russia and China have already supported an adjustment of United Nations Security Council resolution sanctions on North Korea in a trilateral statement with Pyongyang last year. A Kim summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin would underscore to the White House that North Korea may not choose to wait around indefinitely for Washington to come to its senses about the wisdom of a more piecemeal approach to disarmament – one that recognizes that the path ahead will be long, difficult, and best navigated one bit at a time.

There is another matter that the administration should also appreciate: Every moment that North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and ballistic missile manufacturing capabilities remain unencumbered by any sort of agreement that might cap production, Kim Jong Un is free to expand his nuclear forces. As the months pass, the task of disarming a nuclear-armed North Korea grows more daunting. North Korean negotiators have recognized this in the past. In January 2004, former U.S. nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker testified to Congress that a senior North Korean diplomat in Pyongyang, where he was on a fact-finding visit, underscored that “the time that has been lost [in dealing with us] has not been beneficial to the U.S. side.” He went on: “With an additional lapse in time, our nuclear arsenal could grow in quality and quantity.”

Back then, North Korea didn’t have even half of the capabilities it has demonstrated today. And so, those words ring truer today than they did then. The sooner the administration takes them to heart, the better.