On Sentosa Island, we just witnessed history in the making. Indeed it was a supremely historical week for the United States, our allies, and the New World Order carefully erected after the Cold War by Presidents of both parties. The Trump Administration has effectively jettisoned that order, and replaced it with a Kissinger-inspired model of strategic accommodation with Russia and China: www.scmp.com/... This is a huge gamble by a rank amateur, assisted by extremists like Bolton and Pence who keep doing their best to blow his poker hands. But for Trump it’s just another round in his lifelong habit of gambling for vast amounts, doubling the stakes, then over-leveraging his winnings on a crap-shoot and to hell with his investors and employees. His negotiating tactics consist of blowing up the status quo and sifting through the debris. The trouble is those stakes now include the global economy, our national security, and world peace.
It was a touching media moment. No, really; no-one ever dreamed we would see a U.S. President glad-handing a North Korean Dictator, not even Dennis Rodman. But aside from the predictable Statement of Intent document www.cnn.com/..., what has really been implemented is the “freeze-freeze” option long advocated by Putin and Jinping: For the U.S. to stop joint military exercises with the South in exchange for the North freezing (not eliminating) its nuclear capacities. They have lived up to this for the past 7 months so, technically Trump was within protocol when he cancelled exercises. It was almost incredibly incompetent that he didn’t inform our two closest allies in the region, S. Korea and Japan, or even our own military, but that’s how he rolls. If we had a normal State Department instead of the hobbled rump Trump has slashed and burned, someone could have told him it’s standard procedure to let your allies and troops know, at the higher classifications, that they may be a bargaining chip beforehand. Courtesy and common sense would suggest it as well.
As a donum gratis Kim agreed to destroy a missile engine test site, which is diplo-speak for ‘we’re no longer trying to hit New York or Florida, for today anyway.’ Trump reciprocated by inviting him to the White House for more talks, and even offered to go to Pyongyang at "an appropriate time." The Sentosa Statement was the usual diplomatic boilerplate for inaugurating formal relations; mostly it reaffirms what the DPRK had already promised in the Panmunjom Declaration of April 2018: To “work towards the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."
That is a tall order on all sides. It entails at least a decade-long project of: 1) passing a U.N. resolution to put in place an unrestricted IAEA inspections regime; 2) agreeing on continuous, unrestricted multilateral inspections, a BFD; 3) Disarming and dismantling all nuclear weapons; 4) shipping all parts to a secure location where they can be independently analyzed; 5) dismantling North Korea’s centrifuge program; 6) eliminating its uranium and plutonium stockpiles except for weaker concentrations used in civilian reactors (which also requires a regime of unrestricted and continuous inspections); and 7) agreeing on a long-term security framework for North Korea, including possibly re-unification with the South. But their own survival is the sine qua non, because the North’s regime won’t denuclearize unless its future security is guaranteed, especially by the Chinese.
Also mandatory, though not explicitly mentioned, is for N. Korea to dismantle its biological and chemical weapons programs under unrestricted inspections. We know the Kims have been working on those as well and probably had help from Russia, their longstanding arms dealer. Besides its well-known penchant for poisons and nerve agents, Russia has created the most virulent smallpox strains ever to exist on earth, just when we had virtually eliminated smallpox from the planet. Verifying N. Korea didn’t get any of this or acquire Novichok either, is going to be even more difficult than denuclearization. It was a major faux pas for the Trump Team not to mention it.
Trump was played like a cheap balalaika by Russia and China. They understand how to flatter him and cater to his media addiction and ignoramus base, while getting what they want: Reduced U.S. influence throughout Asia in general, and Korea in particular. That was the main reason they encouraged the Kims to build a nuclear arsenal in the first place: As leverage to make the USA go away. In an authoritarian environment, the weaker power always obeys the stronger, almost as a bureaucratic reflex. The leadership of N. Korea would never have mounted such an expensive, resource-draining effort without a green light (and help) from Russia and China.
At first blush, it might seem like a creative gambit by Team Trump to open up to N. Korea, and re-align the U.S. with China and Russia. The braying cabal of benighted asses on Faux Noose, Breitbart and Radio Right are delighted; comparisons with Nixon and Reagan abound. But a close analysis of Niall Ferguson’s rather fawning exfoliation of the Kissinger Model, as implemented by the Trump Team, reveals critical, existential faults: We didn’t 'pivot’ towards Iran, Obama balanced competing interests in the region and gave us a verifiable nuclear agreement, with all allies on board and IAEA inspections. And it was Bush who torpedoed the denuclearization agreement Secretary Albright had worked out between Kim Jong Il and President Clinton, with the Neocon’s “Axis of Evil” policy. Irrationally, Trump on Sentosa said the Iranian Regime is “very different” now than a few months ago, and he and Pompeio have hinted at a unilateral U.S. renegotiation of the JCPA or Iran nuclear deal, which took years of intense effort by many countries. This is state chaos at its finest. They're applying the Schoenberg paradigm of shaking up the box to see what comes out. It’s just like what they did at the G-7: Let’s upend time-tested, war-annealed geopolitical structures and settlements, and “we’ll see what happens”. They followed the same tack with North Korea: Scare the hell out of everyone by exacerbating the crisis, and then take credit for 'fixing' it. “Sleep well tonight!”
But Trump and Kissinger's most fundamental error is to realign the U.S. long-term with authoritarian regimes. Kissinger claims this will buy world peace. But that ignores the cognitive dissonance between democratic aspirations and dictatorships. If we truly believe the arc of history bends towards justice, we can’t collude with autocrats in oppressing their neighbors and our friends. At best we can cooperate with them on mutual concerns like migration and global warming. We can’t just ignore their calculated and relentless subversion of democracy across the planet. Of course we're alive to the classic Thucydides Trap of competing powers: foreignpolicy.com/… Nobody wants to be sucked into a nuclear conflict. But neither do we want to be suckered into wholesale appeasement of tyranny and oppression, just because Trump says “we’ve got a world to run”.
The two Koreas already laid out a blueprint for an incipient thaw and peace treaty in their Panmunjon Declaration this spring: in.reuters.com/… That’s where the real breakthrough took place, Trump is just piggybacking on it and taking all the credit, of course (The South’s President Moon is only too glad to let him have a token Nobel. Real statesmen place people above prizes). It will be amazing if the Koreas, China and the U.S. can sign a final peace treaty ending 65 years of undeclared war. Here there is some reason to be sanguine. Korea was a great power in the past, but for the last two centuries it was bullied in turn by China, Russia, the Western powers and Japan. Koreans, North and South, have a justifiable pride in their history and unique culture which is related to, but quite distinct from their neighbors.
The negotiations Trump opened in such a glib and facile manner will realistically take years. We can only hope the Koreans really do overcome the dead albatross of the Cold War. If they succeed, it probably won’t be until Trump and his pathetic retinue of intolerant extremists and autocrat bootlickers have swaggered off into the pages of history. The long-suffering Free World, and those huddled masses still yearning to breathe free, will heave a huge sigh of relief.