A day after President Trump’s landmark meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, in Singapore, the two leaders and their governments sought to shape the understanding of their talks to their advantage. But the contours of the vague agreement remained unclear and open to divergent interpretations.
North Korea’s state-controlled news media said that Mr. Trump had agreed to a phased, “step by step” denuclearization process rather than the immediate dismantling of its nuclear capability, with the United States providing reciprocal benefits at each stage along the way. Mr. Trump has previously insisted that he will not lift sanctions until North Korea has rid itself of its nuclear weapons.
The Trump administration, for its part, insisted that the general wording of the joint statement signed by Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim committed North Korea to an intrusive inspection regime to confirm its “complete denuclearization.” The statement itself, however, did not explicitly use the words “verifiable” or “irreversible” that had been part of the mantra of American officials leading up to the Singapore summit meeting.
“Let me assure you that the ‘complete’ encompasses ‘verifiable’ in the minds of everyone concerned,” Mr. Pompeo told reporters in Seoul, where he flew to consult with South Korean officials. “One can’t completely denuclearize without validating, authenticating — you pick the word.”
When a reporter pressed and asked for more details about how it would be verified, Mr. Pompeo grew testy. “I find that question insulting and ridiculous and, frankly, ludicrous,” he said.
.. “Just landed — a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” he wrote on Twitter. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”
“Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea,” he added. “President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer — sleep well tonight!”
.. critics who accused him of getting way ahead of what could be a long, difficult negotiation to translate the gauzy aspiration of Singapore into a workable plan.
.. “The true test of success is whether the follow-on negotiations can close the gap between the United States and North Korea on the definition of denuclearization and lay out specific, verifiable steps that Pyongyang will take to reduce the threat posed by its nuclear weapons.”
.. the North Korean news agency said the two leaders had agreed to a phased process in which Pyongyang would bargain away its nuclear arsenal in stages, securing matching actions from the United States at each step. Such a process has been opposed by American hard-liners like John R. Bolton, now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, who has argued in the past that the North must quickly dismantle and ship out its nuclear weapons program in its entirety, as Libya did more than a decade ago.
.. Mr. Pompeo declined to discuss the North Korean report. “I’m going to leave the content of our discussions as between the two parties, but one should heavily discount some things that are written in other places,” he said.
The North Korea Summit Was a Trumpian Fantasy from the Get-Go
wishful thinking, lack of preparation, exaggerated rhetoric, disregard for detail, and a cult of personality.
.. Precisely what sort of agreement the North Koreans might be willing to reach, and what Kim meant by “denuclearization,” Trump didn’t dwell upon. To anybody who knows the history of the issue, these are key questions. Pyongyang has been saying it supports the “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” for decades. As far back as 1992, the North and the South signed a mutual declaration committed to this aim. But the reality has been a steadfast refusal on the part of the North to give up its nuclear program.
.. For decades, Trump has exaggerated his negotiating skills as he overpaid for many properties and pushed some of them, such as the Plaza Hotel, into bankruptcy court.
.. By then, some Republicans were calling for the President to get the Nobel Peace Prize, and the White House was ordering commemorative coins featuring Trump and Kim.
More Chaos as Trump Suggests the North Korea Summit May Be Back On
On Friday, after a North Korean official said that Kim was ready to meet Trump “at any time,” Donald Trump, Jr., linked to an Axios story about this statement and crowed, “The Art of The Deal baby!!!”—as if Trump’s decision to cancel the summit had elicited important new concessions from the North Koreans. But that wasn’t the case.
.. Of course, Kim is willing to meet anytime. It was he who requested the summit in the first place.
To sit down one on one with an American President has for decades been a goal of North Korea’s leaders.
.. At the very least, some detailed preparatory work would make it easier to manage expectations in both Washington and Pyongyang.
.. The evidence suggests Trump acted as he did because he didn’t like the tone of North Korea’s statements, particularly those directed at John Bolton, the national-security adviser, and Mike Pence, the Vice-President, after they both suggested that Libya’s disarmament under Muammar Qaddafi would be a good model for the North Koreans to follow.
.. This language suggests the North Koreans have learned the lesson that Pence and many other people around Trump learned a long time ago: the most reliable way to get him to do something you want is to praise him expansively and publicly.
.. the idea that Trump is some sort of master negotiator, or ace business tactician, is a fallacy propagated by himself. Trump’s actual record in doing business deals is one of overpaying, struggling to make them work, and shuffling some of his companies in and out of bankruptcy.
.. The only art he has perfected is promoting himself as a great dealmaker on the basis of such a checkered past.
.. Trump has displayed virtually no regard for the consequences of his actions on American allies, including South Korea and Japan.
.. without giving any advance notice to South Korea, which had worked for months to set up the summit, was shocking even by his standards.
.. To many people who live in Korea or in nearby countries, it seemed like an American President was behaving erratically on a matter of existential importance.
.. Trump looks impetuous and unreliable.”
.. the Trump Administration is demanding that Kim’s regime agree to scrap its entire nuclear arsenal—which it spent thirty years developing—rapidly and unilaterally.
The North Koreans, in talking about “denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula,” appear to be envisaging a much more gradual process that would involve reciprocal measures on the U.S. side.
.. China, which is also a key player, has proposed an initial “freeze for freeze” deal, in which North Korea freezes its nuclear program and the United States suspends its military exercises with South Korea.
US-North Korea summit: How Trump can score a major deal
In 1994 the U.S. and North Korea negotiated what was called the Agreed Framework, which President Clinton hailed as “the first step on the road to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.”
Almost a decade later the U.S. would learn that North Korea had begun to violate the deal almost as soon as the ink was dry by developing a covert uranium enrichment program.
.. Less than three years after discovering its own naïveté, the U.S. returned to the negotiating table as part of the multilateral Six Party Talks. On September 19, 2005, negotiators released a joint statement in which North Korea “committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.”
.. Most significantly, President Bush ordered the U.S. Treasury to reverse the damage it had done to North Korea by targeting Banco Delta Asia, Pyongyang’s financial institution of choice for evading Western sanctions.
.. If there is hope for a good deal, the way to get there is to show North Korea that it cannot manipulate the diplomatic process as it has done so many times before.
.. President Trump would be wise to avoid the mistake the Obama administration made when it gave Iran $7 billion of sanctions relief at the outset of negotiations in 2013, in exchange for a pause in certain aspects of the Iranian nuclear program.
.. Next, the U.S. will have to coordinate every step of the way with South Korea. South Korean President Moon Jae-In is a long-time advocate of engagement with the North. Seoul’s hesitation to stand firm can be deeply frustrating, but a rupture would play right into Kim’s hands.
.. But President Trump and his administration need to be ready for the far more likely North Korean rejection of nuclear disarmament.
.. If it begins to seem that Kim’s professed commitment to denuclearization is not sincere, the U.S. should prepare for the inevitable effort by the North and President Trump’s political opponents to spin the summit’s failure as President Trump’s fault. That could do substantial damage to the U.S. maximum pressure campaign on North Korea.