Could sink a deal

Trump's blind spot on North Korea could sink a deal

The president has sold Kim Jong Un on peace and prosperity. But North Korea's record on human rights stands in the way.

By ELIANA JOHNSON and RUAIRÍ ARRIETA-KENNA

President Donald Trump has banked his North Korea policy on selling Kim Jong Un a future of prosperity and riches. But legislation Trump signed bars companies from investing in the country because of its abysmal record on human rights, an issue the president has given scant attention in talks with Pyongyang.

Heading into his second meeting with the North Korean leader, the president is planning to pitch him on a vision of North Korean modernization, White House officials have said. Trump dangled the prospect of material wealth for Kim’s impoverished homeland on Monday, telling reporters, “I think he’ll have a country that will set a lot of records for speed in terms of an economy.”

It’s not clear how the president is proposing to help Kim realize his economic goals. A provision Trump signed into law as a part of a 2017 sanctions bill cracking down on Iran, Russia and North Korea could prove a crippling obstacle to any American overture, experts said. The law prohibits imports of anything produced or manufactured by a North Korean citizen — and it would fall on Congress, not the president, to repeal the measure.

“Because of U.S. law today, the general counsel of any U.S. company is not going to recommend going into North Korea because of human rights abuses,” said Victor Cha, who served as President George W. Bush’s top adviser on North Korea. The Trump administration, he said, “needs to talk about human rights if they’re going to achieve what they want to achieve.”

That means Trump could ink a nuclear deal with North Korea that lifts some sanctions in exchange for Kim’s promise to give up his nation’s nuclear weapons, but he would have to rely on Congress to repeal the 2017 law in order for any American company to significantly invest in North Korea. That’s unlikely, barring a deal that addresses human rights in a substantive manner.

Since their first meeting Singapore last year, the president has worked to entice Kim to give up his nuclear arsenal by pitching dreams of beachfront condominiums and gold-plated casinos. During their inaugural meeting, Trump played a four-minute video for his counterpart — produced by the CIA and based on a psychological profile of the North Korean leader, according to a source familiar with its production. The video urged Kim to abandon his pursuit of nuclear weapons in order to “enjoy prosperity like he has never seen.”

This approach carried with it a sharp turn away from the brutal nature of the North Korean regime — something to which Trump had, in fact, called attention during the first year and a half of his presidency. Among the first lady’s guests at the 2018 State of the Union address were the parents of Otto Warmbier, the American student imprisoned by North Korea who was returned in a vegetative state early in the Trump presidency, and North Korean defector Ji Seong-ho. Trump decried the “depraved character” of the regime and said “no regime has oppressed its own citizens more totally or brutally than the cruel dictatorship in North Korea.”

There was no rhetoric like that during his discursive 90-minute news conference at the end of his meeting with Kim last June. Pressed on whether, and to what extent, he had challenged Kim on human rights, Trump told reporters, “It was discussed relatively briefly compared to denuclearization,” adding: “They will be doing things. I think he wants to do things.”

“After he met with Kim, never talked about it,” Cha said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Faced with mounting pressure to incorporate human rights into its North Korea policy, the Trump administration has in recent months provided little information to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, limiting the extent to which it has provided classified briefings on the matter, according to two senior Republican congressional aides. Though lawmakers have pressed administration officials on the issue, “they did not provide a lot of substance,” one of the aides said. “I can’t stress the extent to which, in recent months, things have really dried up.”

Experts insist that economic reform alone is not enough to effect change — it must be interrelated with national security and human rights, as the U.S. managed to do at the height of the Cold War. The Jackson-Vanik amendment to the U.S. Trade Act of 1974 cracked down on U.S. trade with the Soviet Union and its satellites in response to human rights abuses. The 1975 Helsinki Accords, signed by 35 countries, recognized Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe while extracting a commitment from the Soviet Union to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms.

“We lose a great opportunity if we don’t focus on human rights as part of our arsenal on North Korea,” said Jay Lefkowitz, who served as special envoy for human rights in North Korea during the George W. Bush administration — a congressionally mandated post for which the Trump administration has yet to nominate anyone. “The irony is, of all the things he’s done in his presidency, the thing that looked the most promising was his North Korea policy during the first 18 months, where he kept both North Korea and China really off balance. And then literally, within the scope of a few hours in Singapore, we took a half dozen giant steps backward.”

Since the Singapore summit, North Korea has shown few signs of abandoning its nuclear weapons — over the past year, reports have shown, the country has expanded its ballistic missile programs and base of fissile material.

North Korea is likely to use any economic gains to finance its nuclear program, according to Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute. “The North Korean leadership doesn’t see it as an either-or trade,” Eberstadt said.

The only thing Kim might find harder to abandon than his nuclear weapons is his police state.

North Korea “operates an all-encompassing indoctrination machine,” according to a 2014 report commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council. The report found that the state uses food as a means to control the population, regularly “disappears” its citizens for perceived disloyalty to the government and runs a vast network of prison and forced labor camps in which torture, rape, and execution are routine. Kim is believed to have ordered the execution of his half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, who was assassinated in 2017 after two women attacked him with VX nerve agent in a Malaysian airport.

North Korea is one of many countries that use forced labor, though American companies do business in many of them by providing voluntary compliance reports to Customs and Border Protection enforcement officials indicating that they are not using forced labor in their supply chain or operations. Coca-Cola, for example, re-entered Myanmar after the Obama administration eased sanctions in 2012 despite the fact that the country still engages in forced child labor, according to the Department of Labor, and opened a bottling plant the next year — a reported $200 million investment.

The 2017 provision Trump signed into law prohibits American companies from doing the same in North Korea even if the president eases sanctions. It created a sweeping presumption that all North Korean labor is, by default, slave labor, stating that “any significant goods, wares, articles, and merchandise mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part by the labor of North Korean nationals or citizens shall … not be entitled to entry at any of the ports of the United States."

Despite this barrier for U.S. businesses, North Korea’s economy and those of neighboring states stand to gain from an easing of multilateral sanctions. Countries like Russia and China have limited though not completely curbed their economic engagement with North Korea because of U.N. sanctions, but those sanctions focus only on denuclearization and not human rights abuses. The Associated Press reported on Sunday that millions of Chinese border city residents hope to benefit from North Korea opening to greater international trade and business investment should the Trump-Kim summit succeed in lifting those sanctions.

The president has not let the law get in the way of his sales pitch. Speaking to a group of the nation’s governors on Sunday evening, a day before departing for Hanoi, Trump said Kim “has a chance to have a country that is so vibrant economically. Maybe one of the most in the world.”

“So I tell him that but I said, ‘You can’t do that if you’re going to keep nuclear. If you do nuclear, that can’t ever happen.’”