Source:
https://scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/2188234/how-trump-and-us-fell-kim-jong-uns-deadly-strategic-deception Opinion
How Trump and the US fell for Kim Jong-un’s deadly strategic deception
- The Hanoi summit continues the quarter-century record of unrelenting failure that is US nuclear diplomacy with North Korea
- Pyongyang’s provocations over the years are as cruel as they are calculated, and the US keeps falling into the trap of underestimating the regime
In hyped-up political theatre – as in a prizefight – when the contest ends in a controversial decision, draw, or snub, a sequel usually follows.
Both United States President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un may be smarting from the awkward end to their summit in Hanoi this week. But the basic power dynamic between the two parties and their will to meet again remain intact.
Hence, in a post-Hanoi sequel, Kim will once again have the upper hand.
It was Kim who, by dangling the possibility of denuclearisation and a chance at making history, coaxed Trump to meet last year. When Kim presents Trump with a sugar-coated offer of further disclosure of his nuclear programmes, the US leader, already ensnared in a labyrinthian process of negotiations with considerable political capital in sunk costs, is likely to take the bait.
Just as Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, reaped well over a billion dollars in recompense from the US (and further billions from South Korea) for a partial freeze of his nuclear accoutrements, the third-generational tyrant also has billions to gain by decommissioning some exhausted reactors and missile bases.
Why would the US allow it?
Because it always has out of hubris, gullibility, and political expediency.
To most Americans, the notion that the weird-looking North Korean dictator presiding over a backward nation of 25 million is running circles around the President of the United States of America is unfathomable. And herein lies the cause of the quarter-century record of unrelenting failure that is US nuclear diplomacy vis-à-vis North Korea: the abiding American inability to take its mockable adversary seriously.
From the early years of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Americans patronised Pyongyang even as Kim Il-sung – state founder and grandfather of Kim Jong-un – was demonstrating extraordinary diplomatic ambidexterity.
Less than three weeks before his large-scale invasion of South Korea in June 1950, the elder Kim bamboozled South Korea with a detailed proposal for establishing an inter-Korean parliament to be launched on August 15 that year, the fifth anniversary of liberation from Japanese colonial rule.
Even though Kim Il-sung had assiduously persuaded Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to support his war of national unification, Americans were unable to see that the 38-year-old leader of a backward nation could be anything but a puppet of his Communist patrons.
When news of North Korea’s invasion of the South broke, a senior State Department official remarked: “The relationship between Stalin and Kim Il-sung is exactly the same as that between Walt Disney and Donald Duck.”
From the early years of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Americans have patronised Pyongyang. Photo: Reuters
In 1972, Kim Il-sung launched a multifaceted charm offensive. He held talks with the South for the first time since the end of the Korean war. He held a series of meetings in Pyongyang with reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Japanese press, and a Harvard University law professor.
Kim came across as reasonable, well-informed, and peace-prone. The propaganda charade continued until an assassination attempt on the South Korean president in 1974.
In 1983, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il manipulated Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to convey to the Reagan administration their desire for direct talks. Deng obliged and did so right up to the eve of the terrorist bombing in the Martyrs’ Mausoleum in Rangoon (now Yangon) that year, the Kims’ assassination attempt on the visiting South Korean leader.
In March 2010, when North Korea was trying to bolster Kim Jong-un’s non-existent credentials for his coming out later that year, Pyongyang reached out to Seoul for military talks – before torpedoing a South Korean navy ship later that month.
November saw the North call on the South for talks to reopen the once-popular Mount Kumgang tourist site, before it shelled an inhabited South Korean island the same month.
North Korea does not merely react to stimuli – either hortatory or hostile – coming out of the White House. Neither does it throw a “temper tantrum”, as the top American State Department official said in the wake of Pyongyang’s second nuclear test on May 25, 2009, which was Memorial Day in the US.
The timing of Pyongyang’s provocations, like the controlled degree of its lethal attacks, are carefully calibrated for maximum impact and minimum chance of reprisal. Nuclear and missile test have taken place on major holidays – North Korean, American, and Chinese. Small-scale lethal attacks on South Koreans and Americans have mainly targeted military personnel and civilians outside mainstream elite South Korean society, thus reducing the risk of retaliation.
North Korea has a game plan for advancing its highest state mission – the absorption of the richer South. By its sheer magnetic existence, South Korea presents an existential threat to the despotic Kim regime. As North Vietnam showed, signing a peace agreement with the US will pave the road for the withdrawal of US troops from the region and isolate the Southern competitor state.
To most Americans, the notion that the weird-looking North Korean dictator is running circles around the President of the United States of America is unfathomable. Photo: Xinhua
Today, becoming a credible nuclear threat to the continental US and forcing the US to abandon South Korea through a mix of carrots and sticks almost seems within grasp.
Trump must stop patronising Kim Jong-un. Just as neither Russia’s Vladimir Putin nor China’s Xi Jinping would part with his nuclear arsenal for the privilege of summitry or for money, Kim will only milk the US for more time while his lethality grows sufficient to compel the US to withdraw from Korea under the banner of “peace”.
The only legitimate, non-lethal means with which to change, through leverage, Kim’s calculus is the sustained enforcement of financial sanctions. Drawn-out diplomacy sheared of leverage carries the risk of giving Kim the time and sanctions relief with which to perfect his nuclear posture review.
By then, the next joust with North Korea may be measured not by money or glory, as in a prizefight, but by how many more survive under tyranny.
Sung-Yoon Lee is Kim Koo-Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies and Assistant Professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University