What is needed and how do we get there. Solving the North Korean riddle.
Between December 2017 and February 2018 the world was on the verge of nuclear confrontation. There was talk in the US of giving Kim a ‘bloody nose’ which would led to the launch of a massive response against Tokyo and Seoul. Pyongyang’s nuclear doctrine reflects its weakness, not strength, and an acute asymmetric balance of power. With no prospect of its nuclear deterrent surviving a US strike, it pursues a ’Scorpion Policy’ of pre-emptive retaliation. Use them or lose them, no possible victory only hara-kiri by proxy. Pyongyang’s trigger was so sensitive that it would have fired without a touch. As Bob Woodward recounts in Fear, H. R. McMaster received a warning at the White House that senior members of the Politburo had told intermediaries that 'the North would take the evacuation of U.S. civilians as a sign of imminent attack’. The world had been a tweet away from nuclear war.
It was President Trump’s bold and courageous offer of a Summit that dragged the Peninsula back from that brink. The subsequent Singapore Summit created a framework for peace and normalisation of relations with the two sides agreeing to take the first steps in the process of denuclearisation on the Peninsula. The interim was a profound disappointment. It was equal opportunity disenchantment. The promised ‘end of war’ declaration never came as the North waited impatiently. While Pyongyang renitently refused to budge. Regardless they stuck with the commitments in Kim’s 2018 New Year’s Address of no testing alongside the continued production of nuclear weapons and Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). This year’s New Year’s Address saw Kim cue his continuing commitment to a settlement with a second unilateral declaration ending nuclear weapons production and any prospect of proliferation. The second Summit was to allow the process to be reset and start to move forward. Instead, it only advertised the widening incommensurability of the positions of the two sides that threaten to take the Peninsula back to a menacing future.
There were effectively two different Summits in the two successive days in Hanoi reflecting an on-going civil-war inside the Administration in Washington waged between those favouring changing regime over regime change and their opponents. On the first day, Kim’s offered to close down and render inoperable Yongbyon’s graphite-moderated Reactor - the source of all the North’s weapons grade plutonium - along with the Highly-Enriched Uranium (HEU) Processing Plant on-site and even the Experimental Light Water Reactor and to allow verification and inspection by US nominated experts. In exchange, he expected an end of war declaration, an easing of the flow of humanitarian aid and some mitigation of the 2016 and 2017 UN sanctions that would snap back on should Pyongyang fail to deliver. This was supposedly a deal whose price could be made right. There seemed to be a deal on the table even if the US, like Oliver Twist, wanted more. This meshed neatly with Pyongyang’s preference for a slow incremental choreographed process as the reel of the North’s nuclear history was run backwards shadowed by the step by step peeling away of the layer upon layer of UN sanctions. It all resonated systematically with the end of January speech at Stanford University by the US Special Representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun.
By the second day the President had been cajoled into following an entirely different scheme. The car crash in Hanoi was the consequence of a President persuaded to move not just the goalposts but to change the game. In the run-up, the signals seemed clear to Pyongyang. Trump had talked about being in no hurry and Biegun’s Stanford speech set the frame for a Fabian incrementalism that was to ease the North onto a political escalator that would take them far and beyond anything realistic in a single step. The political foreplay had convinced Pyongyang that Hanoi assignation was to initiate a new on-going process punctuated by a series of Summits. There were to be serious gestures from both sides, but the way forward was a long-term process of the steady unwinding of incremental steps and way stations as the North certified that Washington was to be trusted and could tame and restrain its ambitions. Pyongyang had stated in Hanoi - to no great surprise - that it intended to continue with its Space Programme. Earlier - and in the New Year’s Address - Kim had re-iterated the same ambition for his civil atomic power programme.
Now the chronologies were at odds with Kim's decade and more long game extended into as many months by Trump. That was all compounded by the sheer audacity and scope of ambition. The apparent squabble over sanctions relief diverted attention away from this new gulf. It all came to a head when that second morning the President brandished a note containing what Washington considered as ‘denuclearisation’. Here the hidden hand of ‘the father of the North’s nuclear weapons programme’ John Bolton was to be found. Bolton overnight had won the battle inside the Administration for Trump’s brain on behalf of the faction supporting regime change in Pyongyang over those wanting to expedite a changing regime in the North. Bolton persuaded the President to ‘go big’ with a pace and breadth unacceptable to Kim and Pyongyang whose ‘transitional demands’ were impossible for Kim to deliver and just incredible on the forced march timescale laid down. The US definition of ‘denuclearisation’ stretched the term beyond breaking point. It was to end the North’s civil atomic power and Space Programmes, force them to relinquish - under any definition of ballistic missiles - their intermediate range missiles and threaten the banishment of their scientists and engineers all chaperoned by a massively intrusive inspections regime. It was a reprise of Libya. Bolton was waving a red rag to Kim’s bull. He and Kim both knew it, Trump probably didn’t.
The ‘play’ for the President - but not John Bolton - went wrong. Trump claimed in the aftermath that Kim was shocked when he brought up the North’s ‘secret’ HEU processing plant at Kangson, near Pyongyang. If Kim was genuinely shocked his officials had been keeping from him reports in open-source literature about Kanson circulating for more than a year 'naming and shaming' the plant. There are reports of a third processing plant, but neither fundamentally makes a difference as Kim has to date neither agreed to, nor produced, an inventory of nuclear holdings nor even the major operating plants. This was not the North losing face exposed as liars, but stunned by the extent and presumption of US demand inflation. As Ri Su Yong, the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) Vice-Chairman who serves as the Party’s International Secretary, said when I met him last year, ‘We are not a surrendered country. This is not Japan in August 1945’. US maximalist demands had risen from the dead. Trump’s triumph in Singapore expunged in a flourish. It was as if that first Summit never happened. The world was back to more of the same with the ghosts of Bush and Obama peering on.
Both Leaders are way out ahead of their administrations. Kim has chided his Foreign Ministry saying: 'They don’t understand what I’m trying to do’. The same is true on the US side with the President’s ‘love affair’. That’s the chemistry and the catalyst. Yet Kim’s close advisers in Pyongyang have been troubled readers of both Bob Woodword's Fear and ‘I Am Part Of The Resistance Inside The Trump Administration’ (New York Times, Sept. 5, 2018). Since Pompeo’s abortive visit last July, they have worried that while the President was willing to do a deal, he was being sabotaged by his ‘adjutants’. The Secretary of State arrived not with the promised ‘end of war’ declaration agreed by Trump in his one on one with Kim in Singapore, but instead with a shopping list of demands for a full inventory of nuclear holdings, invasive inspections and exacting verification. This has been re-enforced by the shambles and hijacking of Hanoi. This has not been read back in Pyongyang as some dazzling distillation of The Art of the Deal as unpredictability, volatility and fitfulness become transformed into a diplomatic artefact. Rather it has been taken as further proof of Trump’s inability to safely deliver any deal let alone one resilient and robust enough to withstand the brutal nature and future of US politics. Kim has serious questions to ponder. He will be told by those sceptical of US intentions that all Washington really understands is strength. Some will urge him to launch a satellite from Sohae. If he does, there will be an incandescent response both from those in the US who believe this is a breach of promise and those who know better. The world will return to the nuclear winter of 2017/18. Yet all the logic demonstrates that Kim is willing to trade his nuclear deterrent for security guarantees - that a far more real than a piece of paper signed by the President - counterbalanced by the lifting of UN sanctions and a major infrastructure programme provided to the North. For Kim, neutralising one existential threat to the regime allows him to turn to address the second and keep the people who matter in Pyongyang happy by growing the economy.
What is to be done? First stop believing your own propaganda. Kim came to the table as a result of technological achievement putting him in the grey-zone where Washington and the White House were unsure as to whether or not he possessed a nuclear deterrent capable of striking the US mainland, not ‘maximum pressure’. Yes the North’s people are hurting. Tens - if not hundreds - of thousands face malnutrition and starvation this year as remnants of last year’s devastating harvest are consumed, but the normal levers of cause and effect don’t operate in a country which believes it faces an existential threat. In the late 1990s, Kim’s Father watched between 400,000 and 800,000 die without coming back to the table. Recognise that carefully controlled sanctions mitigation is part of the negotiating tool-box. The last rounds of UN sanctions can be lifted, in whole or part, with a built-in time switch. The UN Security Council can lift or vary sets of sanctions for twelve months that will automatically be re-imposed and snapback at the end of that period, with no veto available to be wielded by Moscow or Beijing, if Pyongyang fails to deliver and continues to move the process forward.
Second get real. No deal is better than a bad deal? No deal is the bad deal! Let Trump be Trump. Washington needs to keep its eye on the ball and ignore noises off. Keep it simple. The more the negotiation is burdened with the excess baggage brought on board at the expense of clarity and simplicity and special pleading from home and abroad, the more intractable and unattainable it all becomes. The central focus for the President is ‘Make America Safe Again’. To achieve that, the North needs to do two things. Give up its ICBMs and its nuclear weapons programme. That is all that has changed in the last decade. Pyongyang has had short and inter-mediate range missiles capable of hitting Japan and the South for more than a quarter of a century, while it's ‘claimed’ chemical and biological weapons programmes have never previously been challenged by any US President. South Africa is the only other country to voluntarily give up a nuclear weapons programme and the scientists and engineers responsible remained in place. Disabling, dismantling and displacing Yongbyon and its facilities alone will take a minimum of ten years and at a cost $1Billion. The North’s nuclear technicians will be needed to do exactly that.
Someone urgently needs to produce a roadmap with a series of way stations to chart progress on the passage from where we are now to where we need to be - the pace of march can follow later - for the President and Washington needs to abandon its doctrinaire obsession with sanctions as if they are some magic wand to wave over Kim and his administration. Equally, Washington needs to come to terms with the impossibility of a deal where they only offer to counter trade irreversible concessions by Pyongyang for temporary sacrifices by themselves. The good news is with the right will on both sides the process can be quick, even if the product takes time.
Third, last and most important, this is all too important to become just another stick to beat the President for Democrats in Congress. They need to revisit the consequences of past sectarian Congresses. President Clinton signed the Agreed Framework in 1994 that halted the North’s plutonium production and nuclear program for a short decade. The subsequent attempt by Madeleine Albright and the President in 1999 to agree a ‘buyout’ of Pyongyang’s missile programme was strangled by Florida’s hanging chads. Democrats have a duty to the America people - and the world - to demonstrate a level of responsibility missing from Congressional Republicans a generation ago if the history of the future is to read well.
Glyn Ford, Former Labour MEP (1984-2009) and author of Talking to North Korea (2018), Director of Track2Asia
Address: Track2Asia, Residence Belliard, Rue Belliard 205, 1040 Brussels (BE)
E-mail: glynford@track2asia
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