Woefully underprepared and overly optimistic...

The Art of No Deal With North Korea

President Trump was woefully underprepared and overly optimistic for a summit with Kim Jong Un. Time for a more realistic approach to North Korea’s nukes.

By JON B. WOLFSTHAL

President Donald Trump claims he knows how to make deals better than anyone. We are getting our chance to see his negotiating strategy live, as he tries to maneuver back into a position of strength with North Korea. For the past six months, Trump has been reacting to events both in North and South Korea and as a result, North Korea’s position has greatly improved at the expense of the United States. Now, by canceling the long-anticipated summit, Trump is trying to play hard to get with Kim, claiming that the meeting was “requested by North Korea” but cannot take place “at this time.”

Don’t be fooled. Trump wants the meeting as badly as ever, and will jump at the chance to reschedule if and when the time suits him.

Trump tried to recapture the initiative by accepting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s offer to meet face to face in March but since then has lost control of the narrative. Instead of putting the U.S. back into the driver’s seat, Trump has spent the past two months building expectations for the summit to an unsupportable level. Premature talk of Nobel prizes and succeeding where all previous administrations had failed in denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula eventually had to meet the hard reality that, even if North Korea were to agree to eliminate its nuclear weapons, doing so would take place only over a long period of time and in exchange for other things that can guarantee Kim’s security and his control of power inside North Korea.

The reality is that any denuclearization plan in North Korea has to take time. The size, scope and decades of effort by North Korea to produce its current arsenal make it impossible to eliminate it quickly, or to verify its elimination all at once. It is more likely than not that a credible verification and destruction process would take years, if it is even achievable, and as such the United States was having a hard time meeting the president’s desire to achieve instant denuclearization. There’s a reason national security adviser John Bolton was pushing for an all-at-once process with North Korea—because it was not possible and would kill any chance at a negotiated agreement. Bolton prefers regime change through strangulation or military intervention, as his voluminous writings on the subject make clear.

So, where do we go from here? All roads lead back to the negotiating table. South Korean President Moon Jae-in was just in Washington this week making clear that he strongly favors a summit and will do everything in his power to make it a success. He has banked not just his presidency but his career on reconciliation with the North, and was prepared to flatter and reward Trump for his agreement to pursue diplomacy with North Korea. Though South Korea appeared to have been blindsided by Trump’s letter, it will continue pressing for diplomatic engagement, as will China, which has consistently made clear it would not support anything that could lead to conflict on its border. Without full South Korean and Chinese cooperation, there can be no “maximum pressure”—the campaign of sanctions and isolation that Trump claims brought North Korea to the negotiating table in the first place.

Many experts who favor engagement and negotiation with the North—myself included—had been deeply worried about Trump’s lack of detailed preparation for the summit. Trump’s inability to master the complexities of North Korea’s nuclear and missile program, combined with his proven willingness to ignore his advisers and go with his gut, could have led Kim to drive a bargain that left him with many residual nuclear options or with verification far short of what is needed to prove denuclearization has taken place. In this sense, no deal might be better than a bad one.

So it’s good that Trump canceled the meeting. If the summit gets back on track, that may give experts the time to negotiate a viable process that would include verified steps toward denuclearization and a set of steps the United States and its allies could take to provide North Korea with the incentives to follow through on nuclear and missile elimination.

Nuclear diplomacy takes time and hard work. If Trump is serious about giving Kim another shot, he and his team need to put in the difficult and tedious preparation that they spurned ahead of the canceled June 12 meeting. That, after all, is what good deals are made of.