As he prepares for possible talks with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un about controlling the North’s nuclear weapons program, President Trump is facing his most complicated national security challenge so far. He has made the task far harder by threatening to blow up the only other recent deal to control a nuclear program, with Iran.
.. Now consider North Korea, with 20 to 60 nuclear weapons, and facilities for producing plutonium and enriching uranium, many of which are hidden.
Mr. Trump has insisted on the North’s complete and verifiable denuclearization. And, by all indications, he wants it done immediately. Yet by threatening to abrogate the Iran deal and reimpose sanctions Mr. Trump has added to the challenge of making that happen.
.. He has claimed, without a shred of evidence, that Iran is out of compliance
.. and has complained that Iran is still building ballistic missiles, arming Hezbollah and supporting President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. None of these concerns were supposed to be prevented by the deal.
.. He has demanded that Britain, France and Germany fix what he calls “flaws” in the pact by May 12, presumably so he will have someone else to blame when it falls apart.
.. The president, and his new hard-line team of national security advisers, may think that walking away from the Iran deal will persuade Mr. Kim of his toughness and his determination to secure terms that go far beyond those reached with Iran. More likely, Mr. Kim will see it as proof that the United States cannot be trusted to stick to its commitments and will be reluctant to reach any agreement.
.. A serious negotiation with North Korea would include Mr. Trump pressing Mr. Kim to freeze nuclear and missile testing, halt the production of nuclear weapons fuel and the deployment of nuclear weapons and put an Iran-like verification system in place.
.. But why would Mr. Kim agree to any of that if the Americans walk away from the Iran deal? Why would Mr. Kim, or any future adversary for that matter, assume Mr. Trump is negotiating in good faith?
.. Mr. Trump could contribute in an unprecedented way to international peace and security by engaging with Mr. Kim. That possibility will be squandered, though, if the American president escalates a manufactured nuclear crisis with Iran at the very time he is trying to defuse one with North 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.
Donald Trump’s Staff Shake-Up Leaves Jim Mattis in a Key Role
New national-security partners, and conflicting viewpoints, will test the defense secretary
President Donald Trump has, to great fanfare, remade his national-security team in recent days. But the most intriguing and consequential member of that team isn’t one of the newcomers, but rather the one who has been there all along: Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
Mr. Mattis is the most enigmatic member of the Trump team. He’s the Iran hard-liner who defends the nuclear deal with Iran. He’s the warrior who argues for using diplomacy to address North Korea’s nuclear threat. He’s the military man who argues against allowing trade disputes to disrupt ties to key allies.
And he’s the one senior official who has learned how to disagree with Mr. Trump privately without being publicly skewered by the president for doing so.
All those positions were easier for Mr. Mattis to sustain when he was joined at the hip with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. But Mr. Tillerson is gone now, and the key question is whether Mr. Mattis can continue to do his thing when paired with new Secretary of State-to-be Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, both of whom strike quite different tones on those key issues.
“I think he’s more important than ever,” says former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. The question, Mr. Hagel adds, is “how long Mattis can survive in that environment.…There’s an intersection of conflict coming here, and it’s been coming.”
.. the appearance of disconnects between the president and his team on key issues. Consider: Mr. Trump has said the war in Iraq that began in 2003 was one of the biggest strategic blunders in American history. Mr. Bolton has been one of its most vocal champions. Mr. Trump has repeatedly questioned whether Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Pompeo, the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has embraced the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia did so. Mr. Trump has scheduled a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Mr. Bolton, the former American ambassador to the United Nations, has made the case for launching a pre-emptive military strike against North Korea.
.. Which makes Mr. Mattis all the more important as a stabilizing force. He has survived the crosscurrents of Trump administration intrigues through a combination of bureaucratic savvy and careful management of internal splits. Trump advisers say he has mastered the art of convincing the president he agrees with his goals while also sometimes differing with him on how to reach them. He has kept his public profile low enough that he isn’t seen as a rival to the president for attention or glory, while quietly cultivating good relations with members of both parties in Congress.
When Trump Takes Charge
.. more important he was constrained institutionally, in roughly the ways that Republican politicians had promised that he would be — surrounded by a conventional Republican cabinet and (after a while) a conventional White House that essentially governed for him, letting him play the authoritarian on Twitter while the business of the presidency was conducted elsewhere.
.. Donald Trump: a septuagenarian cable-TV addict ill-suited for the responsibilities of his office but still fully capable of attempting to exercise its powers. Which meant that the containment game had to last, not weeks or months, but three more long years to work.
.. And it may not last that long. From his exciting new steel tariffs to his promised summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, Trump has been acting lately like a man less inclined to listen to his handlers — and now those handlers have begun to disappear.
.. it seems less like something happening to Trump and more like chaos orchestrated from the Oval Office: “The narrative of Trump unglued is not totally wrong but misses the reason why — he was terrified of the job the first six months, and now feels like he has a command of it. So now he is basically saying, ‘I’ve got this, I can make the changes I want.’”
.. What would Trump becoming a real president mean in practice? In terms of personnel, it might mean that instead of easing out the hacks and cranks and TV personalities, as his staff managed to do during the year of constraint, Trump will begin to usher out his more qualified personnel and replace them with, well, TV personalities — Cohn with Larry Kudlow, perhaps, or H. R. McMaster with John Bolton.
.. But it also promises to further multiply the number of important vacancies within the government
.. will encourage Trump to take more counsel from the shadow Trumpland of his campaign, where his more misfit-toy advisers tend to congregate.
.. the main Trumpian qualities that have been constrained to date are his impulsiveness and anger and impatience with rules and norms and limits.
.. if he actually begins to exercise the full powers of his office, it’s not so much that the odds of any particular policy course go up as that it becomes more likely that we get more extreme and destabilizing outcomes, somewhere.
That could mean war with North Korea, or it could mean some sort of unexpected and possibly disastrous treaty with Kim Jong-un’s regime; both become more likely the more Trump alone takes responsibility for our peninsular diplomacy.
.. It could mean the real détente with Russia that Trump’s harshest critics think he’s obliged by some corrupt bargain to seek out … or it could mean the kind of military conflict with Moscow that we sometimes seem to be stumbling toward in Ukraine and Syria.
.. different coterie of advisers find new ways to contain and soothe their boss.
.. Maybe Mike Pompeo .. and some combination of TV personalities can do better at managing the president in the long run than the Cohns and Tillersons and McMasters, because Trump will feel that he picked them all by himself.
.. Maybe this president will spend his administration going through periodic frenzies of “I’m in charge” activity, before subsiding back into the virtual presidency of his Twitter feed and Fox injections.
.. if the first year of Trump’s presidency vindicated Republicans who argued that he could be contained, it didn’t tell us anything definitive about whether he will be.
.. a week like this one, with a president chafing against his bonds and snapping some of them, is how a descent from farce to tragedy might begin.