Will North Korea, China give Trump big wins?

By Andrew Hammond

With a March 2 deadline approaching, the United States and China begin a new round of negotiations this week to agree on a breakthrough trade deal. Yet, this is not the only big foreign win Donald Trump is seeking this month as he also prepares for his second summit with Kim Jong-un.

The mood music and expectations surrounding both appears high, but each process remains fragile.

This week's negotiations in Beijing, which will be led by senior officials on both sides including U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, comes amid growing signs a deal is possible to avert a potential trade war.

Trump asserts a "very big deal" is on the horizon and there is a possibility he may himself travel to Beijing to try to seal an agreement with President Xi Jinping before or after seeing Kim in Vietnam.

Yet even if a China deal emerges, key questions remain about whether this will be any more than a temporary truce, or the potential beginnings of a bigger Washington-Beijing grand bargain which Trump says he wants, including in relation to Pyongyang. This uncertainty underlines that bilateral ties, overall, remain mixed with tensions not just in the economic realm but also in broader security and political relations.

Outside of North Korea, where Trump and Xi cooperated to positive effect during much of 2018 to bring Pyongyang to the negotiating table, a string of security issues still cloud the bilateral agenda. This includes South China Sea tensions.

Yet, it is economic disputes that are currently at the fore of the bilateral relationship. And here it is by no means certain that a U.S.-China deal will be done by March after Trump agreed late last year to hold off for 90 days from the planned increase from 10 percent to 25 percent in U.S. tariffs on some $200 billion worth of Chinese goods.

If the talks break down, the mood music could look very different. And Trump is already reported to be soon signing an executive order that will ban Chinese telecommunications equipment from U.S. wireless networks which will needle Beijing.

Trump has previously asserted that "China … has been very tough on our country … We probably lost last year 500 billion U.S. dollars in trade to China. Think of it: 500 billion."And it is this narrative that Trump may yet return to this year if he judges it in his political interests.

On the face of it, therefore, it appears too soon to dismiss the prospects that bilateral tensions will definitely subside in 2019 even if there is a trade deal. Ultimately, as Trump moves into the second half of his term of office, he needs to show his U.S. political base a wide range of concessions from China to seek to fulfill his "America first" agenda.

What he ideally favors ― building on the recent diplomacy with Xi over North Korea ― is a wider grand bargain with Beijing extending beyond the economic arena, where one of his key demands is to see the Chinese currency floated, to other security issues too. A big bargain of this kind could also have a broader positive effect on international relations, helping underpin a renewed basis for bilateral relations under the Trump presidency into the 2020s.

While this potential grand bargain is an agenda item for later in Trump's presidency, North Korea is a clear and present issue with the summit in Vietnam. Ever since Singapore last year, it remains an open question whether sustained moves toward "denuclearization" of the Korean Peninsula will ultimately prove anything more than a mirage.

Yet, despite all the challenges, Trump is nonetheless likely to continue his Korea gambit with a potential 2020 re-election campaign on the horizon. This, along with his desire to cement a place in history, means the potential prize is likely to remain appealing in de-escalating tensions in the world's last Cold War frontier on a sustained basis.

At the heart of the apparent logjam, right now, between Washington and Pyongyang is not just the vagueness of the commitments in Singapore. There also may still be a fundamental difference between Pyongyang and Washington over what next steps are needed to build confidence.

It was always very likely that Kim would be wary about making big concrete commitments, at least initially, and want to win economic and political concessions from Trump before any reduction in nuclear capabilities, let alone committing to "full denuclearization." And in this context, Kim is reportedly looking for Trump to give his support for formally ending the 1950-53 Korean War.

On the face of it, this seems a simple, albeit very symbolic, step. Yet, some U.S. officials and conservatives in South Korea are concerned such a declaration would weaken the Washington-Seoul alliance and remove the rationale for the 28,000 U.S. forces stationed in the South.

Taken together, this underlines why February is such a big month for Trump. He could yet enter March on the crest of a foreign policy wave, or unexpectedly suffer plunging fortunes if talks with Pyongyang and/or Beijing crash.

Andrew Hammond (andrewkorea@outlook.com) is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics