north-korea-denuclearization

Stunned Fox Host Changes Subject When Tulsi Hits Trump From The Left

Tulsi: The US can’t get North Korea to denuclearize while attempting regime change in Venezuela, Sryia, Iran.

Trump ripped up the Iran nuclear treaty but still expects North Korea to view it as credible.

After the Trump-Kim Failure

The president was right to walk rather than accept a bad deal, but look out ahead.

President Trump was right to walk away from his summit with Kim Jong-un rather than accept a bad nuclear agreement, but the outcome underscores that he was bamboozled last year at his first summit with Kim. Whatever genius Trump sees in the mirror, “the art of the deal” is not his thing.

At this meeting, Kim apparently sought a full end to sanctions on North Korea in exchange for closing only some nuclear sites. That was not a good deal, and Trump was right to walk rather than accept it.

“Basically they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, but we couldn’t do that,” Trump said, adding: “Sometimes you have to walk.”

President Reagan famously marched out of a 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, rather than accept an arms control agreement with Russia that he regarded as flawed. A year later the Russians returned with better terms and a deal was made — and we can all hope that something similar will happen this time.

Still, there are significant risks ahead. The most important is that North Korea may return to testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, for that would mark a huge escalation of tensions and renewed concerns about brinkmanship and war.

Unfortunately, North Korea is an otherwise unimportant country that gets attention only when it behaves provocatively. So its leaders have learned that their best leverage is to fire missiles, detonate warheads, or start up nuclear complexes.

While Trump was right to walk in this case, he also seems to have played his hand poorly in the run-up to the summit. In particular, he signaled that he eagerly wanted a deal and that “fantastic success” was likely, all of which probably led Kim to raise demands in the belief that Trump would fold.

With normal presidents, summit deals are largely agreed upon ahead of time. As one veteran diplomat put it, presidents pull rabbits out of hats, after diplomats have worked diligently ahead of time to stuff the rabbits into the hats. But Trump has never had much patience for that meticulous diplomatic process, instead placing excessive faith in breakthroughs arising from personal relationships — and his faith was clearly misplaced this time.

The North Korean side had refused to hash out the summit outcome in advance with the highly regarded U.S. special envoy, Stephen Biegun, presumably because Kim thought that he could outfox Trump in person in Hanoi the way he had in Singapore nine months ago.

The collapse of the latest talks also underscores how misguided Trump was at that earlier meeting. He didn’t understand that Kim uses “denuclearization” to mean something different than the meaning in the United States, and he gave Kim the enormous gift of legitimacy that comes with a summit, without getting anything comparable in return.

The collapse of the latest talks also underscores how misguided Trump was at that earlier meeting. He didn’t understand that Kim uses “denuclearization” to mean something different than the meaning in the United States, and he gave Kim the enormous gift of legitimacy that comes with a summit, without getting anything comparable in return.

It is also distasteful to see Trump praising Kim and referring to him as “my friend” and a “great leader,” and, last year, asserting that Kim had sent him “beautiful letters” and that “we fell in love.” It’s perfectly appropriate to engage with ruthless dictators, but fawning over them is a betrayal of our values.

In Vietnam, Trump might also have shown Kim what freedom of the press looks like. Instead, the White House barred four American reporters from a dinner after two of them had shouted questions for Trump.

Still, if the risk is of a return to high tensions ahead, it’s also possible to foresee a path that over time does make progress with North Korea. I tend to agree with skeptics who believe that Kim has zero intention of ever giving up his nuclear weapons stockpile — that’s what North Koreans told me on my last visit to the country in 2017 — but there is still room for diplomacy that leaves the world better off.

In particular, Kim seems willing to reach a bargain on continuing his moratorium on testing warheads and missiles and on freezing production of nuclear fuel at his complex on Yongbyon, and those are worthy goals if the price is not too high. A reasonable price would be relaxation of sanctions on inter-Korean projects, such as South Korean manufacturing, tourism and rail projects in North Korea.

Those inter-Korean initiatives also have value in that they may over time help normalize North Korea, give it a stake in the outside world, and undermine the regime’s authority.

That kind of limited deal should be an aim of diplomacy going forward, and South Korean President Moon Jae-in — who helped start the peace process between North Korea and the West — is well placed to pursue it, with American backing.

Denuclearization Means the US, Too

Jeffrey Sachs accuses the world’s leading military power of upholding international law only for others.

Kim and Trump Back at Square 1: If U.S. Keeps Sanctions, North Will Keep Nuclear Program

Nearly two years into his presidency and more than six months after his historic summit meeting with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, President Trump finds himself essentially back where he was at the beginning in achieving the ambitious goal of getting Mr. Kim to relinquish his nuclear arsenal.

That was the essential message of Mr. Kim’s annual New Year’s televised speech, where he reiterated that international sanctions must be lifted before North Korea will give up a single weapon, dismantle a single missile site or stop producing nuclear material.

The list of recent North Korean demands was a clear indicator of how the summit meeting in Singapore last June altered the optics of the relationship more than the reality. Those demands were very familiar from past confrontations: that

all joint military training between the United States and South Korea be stopped, that

American nuclear and military capability within easy reach of the North be withdrawn, and that

a peace treaty ending the Korean War be completed.

“It’s fair to say that not much has changed, although we now have more clarity regarding North Korea’s bottom line,’’ Evans J.R. Revere, a veteran American diplomat and former president of the Korea Society, wrote in an email.

“Pyongyang refused to accept the United States’ definition of ‘denuclearization’ in Singapore,’’ he wrote.

To the United States, that means

the North gives up its entire nuclear arsenal;

in the North’s view, it includes

a reciprocal pullback of any American ability to threaten it with nuclear weapons. “

The two competing visions of denuclearization have not changed since then.”

Mr. Trump and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, who is supposed to turn Mr. Trump’s enthusiasms into diplomatic achievements, dispute such conclusions. They note that the tone of one of the world’s fiercest armed standoffs has improved. It has, and both leaders say they want to meet again.

In a tweet on Tuesday night, Mr. Trump cited Mr. Kim’s offers not to produce or proliferate weapons, without mentioning the many caveats. He went on to say that he looked forward “to meeting with Chairman Kim who realizes so well that North Korea possesses great economic potential!”

Mr. Kim’s message, delivered in the style of a fireside chat from what appeared to be his library, had none of the old-style threats of turning Seoul into a “sea of fire” or striking the United States with a “nuclear sword of justice.”

Mr. Trump, for his part, has never returned to his 2017 warning that any hostile moves by the North would be “met by a fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

He swung to the other extreme, declaring after Singapore that the nuclear threat from the North was over — a statement even his most loyal aides have not repeated — and that he and one of the world’s most notorious dictators “fell in love.”

.. By some measures there has been modest progress. It has been 13 months since the North tested a nuclear weapon or a long-range missile, a change that Mr. Trump and Mr. Pompeo cite as the first fruits of what some officials now concede will be a long diplomatic push.

.. But Mr. Trump’s strategic goal, from the moment he vowed to “solve” the North Korea problem rather than repeat the mistakes of past presidents, has been to end the North Korean nuclear and missile threat, not suspend it in place.

Mr. Trump dispatched his first secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, to Seoul in March 2017 to declare that a mere nuclear freeze would not be enough. Back then, Mr. Tillerson declared there would be no negotiations, and certainly no lifting of sanctions, until the North’s dismantling had begun. A nuclear freeze would essentially enshrine “a comprehensive set of capabilities,” he argued.

The decision Mr. Trump must make now is whether to backtrack on the objective of zero North Korean nuclear weapons even if that means accepting the North as a nuclear-armed state, as the United States has done with Pakistan, India and Israel.

.. “Kim seems to be saying outright that his patience is running thin at the continued insistence on unilateral disarmament,” Vipin Narang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who follows North Korea closely, wrote in an email. “The stick was the threat to go down a ‘new path’ if the U.S. doesn’t reciprocate.”

.. To hard-liners like Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, who excoriated past administrations for making concessions ahead of disarmament, capitulating to Mr. Kim on this issue is anathema.

.. But to those who have viewed Mr. Trump’s “maximum pressure” as a strategy bound to fail, Mr. Kim’s offer of a step-by-step approach is the only pathway to success — though maybe a success that constrains, rather than eliminates, the North’s nuclear ambitions.

“When zero weapons is not on the table — and it’s not — then something less than 100 nuclear weapons seems better than the alternative,’’ said Robert S. Litwak, author of “Preventing North Korea’s Nuclear Breakout” and a scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington.

.. Oddly, Mr. Litwak noted, merely constraining a nuclear capability — rather than eliminating it — was Mr. Trump’s complaint about the Iran nuclear deal, which he abandoned last year. Mr. Trump argued that the Iran deal was not a permanent solution and that the United States was safer reimposing sanctions rather than sticking with an accord that would allow Iran to resume enriching nuclear material — but not build weapons — in 2030.

Now, facing a North Korean state that already has 20 to 60 such weapons — Iran never had any — Mr. Trump must decide whether it is better to constrain the growth, or stick with the position he defended so hotly as a presidential candidate and into his first year in office.

Some advisers around Mr. Trump, including some who have left in the past year, believe that the number of weapons means little to the president; he wants to be seen as the man who ended the Korean War. That is why, one former adviser said recently, Mr. Trump kept repeating the suggestion that he might win a Nobel Peace Prize.

“The bottom line is that Pyongyang wants to keep its nuclear program, engage the United States in a process designed to improve relations, reassure the United States that it will not use its nukes or proliferate,” Mr. Revere noted, and “reap the benefits of better ties with Washington.”

“Are these disparate and contradictory goals reconcilable?” he asked. “Probably not.”