The squatter in the White House who last August promised to deliver to North Korea “fire and fury like the world has never seen” tweeted Tuesday morning that “If not for me, we would now be at War with North Korea!” He also said the United States is having “good conversations” with the dictatorial dynasty of Kim Jong Un. Pr*sident Trump obviously plans to keep playing out the Singapore charade for all it’s worth.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will on Thursday be in North Korea for more talks. It’s his third trip to Pyongyang but the first since Trump and Kim signed a bland boilerplate agreement in Singapore last month that was far weaker than one signed 13 years ago when Kim’s father was the supreme leader of the North and the U.S. was trying to get him to stop trying to build nuclear weapons.
With the photo-ops of Singapore no longer feeding Trump’s and Kim’s egos, the hints Trump made on Twitter Tuesday would seem to suggest that Pompeo will return home with something more concrete than the Singapore pact filled with its references to a firm “commitment” to denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.
One possibility would be for Kim to provide a list of all the facilities, equipment, and weapons that the North now has. That’s a step that has to happen at some point if any verifiable agreement on eliminating Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal is going to be worth the paper it is written on. Such a list released before the mid-terms would surely boost Trump’s public standing, though foreign policy is never much of a vote-mover except when a war is killing lots of Americans.
It is quite possible Pompeo will only return with the remains of a few U.S. military personnel killed more than 65 years ago in the war that cost the lives of at least 3 million people from 18 nations, including hundreds of thousands of Korean civilians of both the North and South. It goes without saying that, even at this late date, for the families of those missing-in-action men, returning the remains means closure and is an easy and welcome gesture for the North to make. It gives them diplomatic points and costs them nothing. But even this repatriation of skeletal remains may not happen.
What exactly will Pompeo say to his North Korean counterparts about recent news reports in which unnamed U.S. intelligence officials are cited as claiming the North is expanding its nuclear operations, stockpiling fissile material, hiding secret nuclear facilities, and may be planning not to turn over all its nukes? Anything at all? Will the tough public persona he’s crafted over the years be on display as part of the diplomatic efforts?
National Security Adviser John Bolton long has been one of our nation’s ultrahawks. He has more than once in the past two decades urged pre-emptive strikes on North Korea’s nuclear facilities and excoriated the Obama administration’s policies vis-à-vis Pyongyang:
Analysts are fairly unanimous, however, in deriding National Security Adviser John Bolton’s hypothetical and hyperbolic remark Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation that U.S. experts, “with North Korean cooperation, with full disclosure of all of their chemical and biological, nuclear programs, ballistic missile sites... would be able to dismantle the overwhelming bulk of their programs within a year.”
Bolton said he was sure that Pompeo would be talking to the North Koreans about “how to dismantle all of their WMD and ballistic missile programs”—and, “if they have already made the strategic decision to do that and they’re cooperative, we can move very quickly.”
Dismantling the North’s nukes in a year would certainly be a feather in Donald Trump’s MAGA cap. But analysts who heard Bolton’s remarks and Trump’s claims that the process would soon be underway must have been hard-pressed to keep from breaking ribs from laughing.
Two long-time experts cited by Donald Kirk at The Daily Beast noted that a year is out of the question. Joseph Yun was, until he recently retired, the State Department’s leading expert and negotiator on North Korea. He thinks the whole process “might take 15 or 20 years.” Choi Jin-wook, former head of the Korea Institute of National Unification, said the dismantling process “is going to be several years if at all.”
For the next couple of years, however, we can expect Trump to keep spouting contradictory claims about North Korea, as he has done recently by saying the nuclear threat is over, following that up 10 days later by signing an extension of an executive order claiming that the North represents “an unusual and extraordinary” threat to the United States.
So far, the Great Deal Maker has been all give and no take with North Korea. In a few days, we’ll find out if Pompeo has managed to improve on that record by returning home from Pyongyang with something more substantive than a few American bones no matter how important as that no doubt would be for the families of those men.