Trump-Kim II: The Least Bad Outcome

From March 4, 2019

Such is our politics today that, while there seems to be a consensus that last week’s Trump-Kim summit was a failure, there are few who agree on why that is so.

The anti-Trump left and never-Trump right view everything he does as failure. The diplomacy-for-diplomacy’s sake (i.e. process over results) crowd have no prospects of more working groups and multi-lats. The Subaru driving arms-control crowd and the isolationist America First’ers didn’t get whatever they wanted. Deep down, even the pro-Trump right has to question somewhere in their lizard brains why their champion was unable to make a great deal.

I will make the possibly provocative claim that this summit was a success, in spite of the efforts of President Trump and Mega Leader Kim. Or in spite of them. Even I don’t know at this point. What makes this summit a success, in my view, is that exactly nothing happened. It was entirely within Trumps ability to give away the proverbial farm in order to reach a grand bargain. To be the one who brought peace to Korea. The one who makes, as they say, the best deals. Not only was it within his ability, he even seems to be inclined towards this type of self-centered, short-sighted diplomacy. He wouldn’t be the first president to succumb to this temptation — c.f. Obama’s Iran deal and the massive pressure Clinton placed on Ehud Barack in 2000 to sign a bad treaty with Arafat for no reason other than to be the Mideast peace-broker he so desperately thought himself destined to be — but Trump seems especially wired to engage in photo-op diplomacy. I am confident that sometime before he leaves the White House, Trump will shoot for the fences in some horrible deal, just because he wants to.

But he didn’t do it this time. Yes, his statements regarding Otto Warmbier were wrong, inappropriate and unnecessarily exculpatory. Of less tragic but more strategic importance, any effort to modify-down the military cooperation between the U.S. and ROK is bad call. Even if only at a symbolic level. But does anyone doubt that it was possible, just possible, that Trump might have given much more just to get that deal? I felt there were three paths, each leading to a bad outcome, down which Trump could have gone.

The first of those paths appeals to the President’s “deal making” instincts and his seeming reliance on personal relationships. The apparent fact that he seems to have a soft spot in his heart for dictators and autocrats aside, he really seems to have taken to Kim (at least he wants the public, and Kim, to think so), and therefore he might have been inclined to give him a little something. Trump is not the first president to try to woo concessions from an autocrat through flattery. FDR certainly played the good cop to Churchill’s bad cop when dealing with “Uncle Joe.” His undoubted personal charm, which served him so well in retail politics, did not in end help a single Pole, Hungarian, Czech or Romanian remain free from Stalin’s post-war ambitions. Kim is no Stalin, but neither is Trump a Roosevelt. Flattering the Grand Leader — who is flattered in extremis everyday by everyone he encounters— is the price paid just to get a summit. (More on the tragedy of that fact below.) It will not get you concessions. And when those concessions don’t spring forth from telling Kim he’s a great guy, from giving him the positive recognition yo think he craves (because it’s what you crave), where do you go from there? What do you give him next?

The second possible path, and none of these are mutually exclusive, was made possible only by domestic U.S. politics. It is, of course, the tried-and-true political tactic of distraction. Wouldn’t it have been plausible that the President might have taken the opportunity to grab headlines with a major agreement in order to push the Michael Cohen testimony off the front page? Would that have been an unprecedented move? How many Sudanese aspirin factories, Iraqi anti-aircraft facilitates and tents in the Afghan desert had to be destroyed to distract us from Ken Starr’s investigation? Trump and Clinton, in my view, are probably on about equal moral footing, so I guess I should be surprised that Trump didn’t offer the Maximum Leader the opportunity to host the next season of The Apprentice. (As an aside, the irony here is that many pro-Trump pundits conjectured that the Cohen hearings were scheduled with the intention of pushing any potential U.S.-DPRK agreement out of the headlines. And I doubt there’s anything in the world that would have compelled CNN to cover the summit even if Trump and Kim held hands and ascended to Heaven.)

And, regrettably, there is the third possible path: Kim could have simply outsmarted Trump. I am not saying this as some sort of rabid anti-Trumper. Rather, simply out of a concern that the President hasn’t shown a great command of international relations, motivations, agendas (open or hidden) or the desire and aims of other countries. Put simply, Trump is like the vast majority of Americans who simply never felt a need to care about the world beyond a vague recognition that there are, allegedly, other countries. What does a New York real estate developer and TV personality need to know about the intricacies of Northeast Asian politics? Frankly, what do most ex-governors and senators know about such things? (Off the top of my head, I can think of only four or five presidents that had a serious knowledge (beyond a guiding philosophy, that is) of foreign affairs prior to election, let alone interest: Bush I, Nixon, maybe Eisenhower, Theodore Roosevelt and maybe Jefferson. Any argument?) The difference is, most presidents are career politicians. And more than most, they recognize (1) the importance of not committing on an issue they know they don’t know and (2) being smart enough not to give away anything without getting something in return. You’d think the author of the “Art of the Deal” would also know that, and maybe down deep he does.

So, it’s fair to say, there were plenty of ways in which this summit could have led to a bad, if not disastrous, deal. But it didn’t. And in that way, I count it as a success, even if a small one. But, in a peculiar way, it is a success in exactly the same way our Korea policy has been a success since 1953. Yes, a success. A success insomuch as this is one of those seeming insoluble problems of diplomacy, like the Arab-Israeli conflict but with nukes. For four decades Korea was subsumed in the context of the Cold War. The Soviets and the PRC restrained the North while we rebuilt the South. The DPRK was just another communist client state that represented no more of an independent threat than Bulgaria, whose main export was comically over-the-top propaganda that made the East Germany Ministry of Information look like C-SPAN. Things might have changed with the demise of the Soviet Union, but the Kims seemed to have learned a lesson from 1989. Rather than becoming the Asian East Germany, as so many expected, Kim Il-Song doubled-down on repression coupled with a belief that nuclear weapons were the best guarantor of independence. Kim Jog-Il let it ride for 20 years, as Clinton and then Bush both waited for the whole thing to implode, hoping only that that implosion wouldn’t take Seoul with it.

The Kims’ bet paid off. And while the U.S. and our allies avoided tragedy, at least for now, we seem to have reaped a Catch-22. The Kim’s aren’t crazy. Rather, they seem to have mastered the art of brinkmanship. Every few years, conventional saber rattling, self-imposed human suffering on their population and the threat of a refugee crisis or by simply floating the possibility of peace, the regime new it could wring concessions from their adversaries (or allies, even). All the while, despite sanctions. Despite international isolation. Despite the concerted and sincere efforts of four consecutive U.S. administrations. Despite everything, they achieved their goal of obtaining an independent nuclear deterrent. So long as those weapons exist, and so long as they restrain their own actions, the gang in Pyongyang do not need to fear an attack from the south. The regime may yet collapse, but such a collapse will be slow and from the inside.

An that is where this summit, even if it was a success when viewed in a diplomatic vacuum, is still part of a larger failure. As shown above, we were unable (or, more accurately, unwilling) to take the steps that would have denied the DPRK their nuclear ambitions. Considering those steps carried the risk of a full-scale war, conventional but none the less catastrophic, that path might have been the best option. But it was always in our power to deny them their political ambitions. So long as the North remained the Hermit Kingdom, and their international recognition was confined to Beijing, Havana and other misfit states and communist anachronisms, we denied the Kims the legitimacy they craved. But Trump gave them that last year. For nothing. Only vague promises to stop nuclear testing and strive for a “denuclearized” Korean peninsula, which from their point of means a peninsula free of Americans. Worse than playing tippy-toe with Putin. Worse than idiotic trade policies. Worse than ill-considered withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan. Worse than haranguing our allies. Those policies can, possibly, be reverse. This can not. A seismic geopolitical shift in U.S. policy in favor of an adversarial nuclear power. The nuclear power that seems most likely to use that power. And Trump gave them the one thing that they most wanted and would never be able to achieve on their own — legitimacy. And this summit was a success simply because he didn’t give them more - the bar was that low.

Perhaps Trump has learned his lesson regarding the DPRK. Perhaps not. But at least we seem to be off the path to disaster, for now.