North Korea: Is Trump failing?

The Korea Times roundtable to tackle the aftermath of the no-deal Hanoi summit between North Korea's Kim Jong-un and the U.S.'s Donald Trump is under way at the Times conference room, March 14. From right are Prof. Hwang Jae-ho, director of the Global Security Cooperation Center, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies; Asia Times correspondent Andrew Salmon; Michael Breen, author of "The New Koreans;" Michael Hay of HMP Law, who ran North Korea's only foreign law firm; and The Korea Times digital managing editor Oh Young-jin. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul

By Michael Breen

When U.S. President Donald Trump was on his way to Hanoi last month to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for a second time, experts said he would have to come away with an agreement of sorts. If he did not he would, in diplomatic terms, have failed.

Well, Mr. Trump went home with nothing. May we say then that he failed? Is his North Korea policy in tatters?

The truth is ― as with so much to do with the mercurial American president, and of course with the opaqueocracy that is North Korea ― it is hard to say.

What we do know is that Trump remained polite about Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. We know Trump well enough by now to know that he would signal a real collapse of negotiations with an insult. "Rocketman is a loser. North Korea should fire him."

The absence of such a tweet is evidence that the talks stumbled, but did not fall.

But that does not mean Trump is not on a road to failure.

Consider this in terms of what both sides want. The Americans want North Korea to denuclearize. This means they want North Korea to declare itself as a non-nuclear-armed state, destroy or hand over its weapons, turn the facilities into ploughshares, and ― because know-how alone would allow the country to go nuclear again in under a year if it changed its mind ― reassign its nuclear scientists as chefs or something and, I assume, shut down nuclear weapons courses at Kimilsung University or wherever they are.

The trouble with this objective is that it is too specific and does not get to the heart of the "Korea problem." The problem, I would argue, is that the northern and southern parts of the severed nation are opposite in terms of values and practice and lack any basis for good faith unity. De-arming North Korea fails to address these circumstances, which underscore the very reason it needed to arm itself in the first place.

What does North Korea want? North Korea's leaders may be rational and consistent, but they are opaque, which leads to a lot of guessing about them. One certainty is that they want sanctions lifted. After that, it becomes unclear. Possibility number one is that they want to come in out of the cold, develop their economy and that for this they are prepared to destroy their known nuclear weapons and facilities, but retain the potential to re-arm.

Another possibility is that they plan no real change and are approaching Trump from a risk management perspective. If that is the case, they might serve up a missile launch when Trump announces his plan for re-election. A third possibility is that they still want to unify the peninsula on their own terms and see nuclear weapons as integral to this aim.

These possibilities are not mutually exclusive. But they have one thing in common ― there is a role for nuclear weapons. A fourth possibility ― that North Korea wants to give up being a nuclear power and return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with its tail between its legs ― would be nice, but appears to be the least favored by analysts.

It is precisely because it is this last scenario that the U.S. is pushing for that suggests the talks may well fail. I hope I am wrong, but the answer to our question of whether Trump is failing may well be, no, not yet.

Michael Breen is author of "The New Koreans."

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