Trump in Pyongyang?

Donald Trump’s recent pronouncement that he plans to reach out to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un should come as no surprise. Trump held three summits with Kim during his first term in office, the first sitting president to meet a North Korean dictator. However, while Trump is right that summitry is the only way to solve tensions between Washington and Pyongyang, the president is wrong if he thinks Kim will quickly agree to a meeting.
The world is a different place today than it was in 2018. North Korea has pivoted away from seeking better relations with Washington to building closer ties with America’s two top rivals: Russia and China. Pyongyang’s thousands of troops in Kursk fighting alongside Russian soldiers are the most tangible sign of that pivot. Kim told his country’s elite that the United States was an implacable foe that must be weakened and confronted.
North Korea has also accelerated the deployment of nuclear-armed missiles that can destroy both regional targets and American cities. This buildup has triggered a regional arms race, with both South Korea and Japan also building up their missile arsenals. South Korea’s debate over its own nuclearization rages on, with Tokyo likely to follow suit. Tensions are high. In this kind of environment, one misstep could trigger a nuclear war.
Trump’s confidence also ignores the fact that he humiliated Kim during their last two meetings. The February 2019 Hanoi session collapsed when an impatient president couldn’t sit still and walked out.[1] An angry Kim returned to his hotel room and slammed the door.[2] Even Trump seemed to have doubts. He called the South Korean leader, Moon Jae-in, as Air Force One lifted off from Hanoi and asked him six times to reach out to Kim.
A snap summit at the Demilitarized Zone three months later was a public relations triumph, Kim responded overnight to a last-minute tweet invitation from Trump, but a policy disaster. The two leaders agreed to restart negotiations. Trump, however, didn’t keep his promise to Kim to postpone an upcoming US-South Korean military exercise, prompting the dictator to accuse the president of making Kim look like an idiot in a secret letter.[3]
Creating a new round of engagement and summit-driven diplomacy is not impossible, but it will not likely be as easy to engineer as Trump seems to believe. Pyongyang’s disillusionment with Trump’s last shot at diplomacy, its reluctance after three decades of failed negotiations with Washington, as well as its newfound closeness with Russia will be hard to overcome. It will require time, patience, and a series of enticing initiatives to have any chance of success.
President Trump’s first move shouldn’t be a summit with Kim—it should be with Moscow and Beijing. Russia’s support for an American initiative will be crucial given its close ties with North Korea. If Trump can play a positive role in brokering a deal settling the war in Ukraine, the door may open to easing tensions in US-Russian relations and increasing consultation on how to resolve the situation in Northeast Asia. As for China, while its relationship with North Korea is at a low ebb, Beijing’s support for an American initiative will still be important in view of its enduring political and economic ties with Pyongyang.
Still, Washington shouldn’t waste any time signaling to Kim that it is willing to resume dialogue. The president checked that box in his Fox News interview. He should follow up with a resumption of his correspondence with Kim that ended when Trump left office. While the media ridiculed the letters, they contained valuable clues from both leaders about how to move negotiations forward.
One immediate objective should be to renew face-to-face talks between the two countries, either between senior officials like the Secretary of State or at the working level. The main reason would be to arrange an early summit between Trump and Kim where they would lay out a gameplan for moving forward with substantive talks.
President Trump should also adopt more realistic goals. Given Pyongyang’s growing nuclear arsenal, Washington should ditch its longstanding near-term objective of denuclearizing North Korea for another near-term goal, reducing the danger of nuclear war. A weapons of mass destruction (WMD) test ban would halt significant improvements and deployment of new weapons. A suspension of visits to the Peninsula by American aircraft and submarines capable of carrying nuclear weapons would calm tensions.
The president will have in his tool-kit other steps to propel talks forward. Lifting sanctions, establishing diplomatic relations, and suspending US-ROK military exercises are some of those measures. Since it’s been almost six years since any talks, which ones Kim will be interested in can only be figured out through in-person meetings.
Maximum pressure may be still necessary. Hiking up sanctions will be ineffective given Chinese and Russian opposition. Instead, President Trump could threaten to redeploy tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea, a risky move that could feed the regional arms race. But it could also serve diplomacy, if the United States offered to stop the deployment in return for progress in talks.
If North Korea reverses course, seeks better relations with Washington and reaches agreements to ease tensions, Donald Trump himself may be the biggest attraction of all. A trip by the American president to Pyongyang would be proof positive that the two countries were on track to averting a dangerous clash and ending the 70-year-old Cold War in Northeast Asia.
For President Trump, a Pyongyang summit would be a public relations bonanza, guaranteed to attract the largest worldwide audience ever. He would be a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize that he has obsessed over since he took office in 2017. Finally, inside-the-Beltway critics on Capitol Hill and the media may harp about appeasement. On the other hand, the average American citizen will be all for anything that smacks of reducing the danger of war and the peacemaker president who can make it happen.[4]
- [1]
Interview with former US official, December 9, 2021.
- [2]
BBC analyst, email exchange with the author, March 3, 2019.
- [3]
Letter from Kim Jong Un to Donald Trump, August 5, 2019.
- [4]
Yi Wonju, “Nearly 70 pct of Americans support peace agreement with N. Korea: poll,” October 29, 2019, Yonhap, https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20191029007700325; Connor Echols, “Americans far less hawkish on North Korea and China than policy elites: poll,” February 6, 2023, Responsible Statecraft, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/02/06/americans-far-less-hawkish-on-north-korea-and-china-than-policy-elites-poll/.