Third Trump-Kim summit: a case of deflated ambitions

On 30th June 2019 Donald Trump became the first serving U.S. President to enter North Korea that it has not officially recognised as a sovereign state and with which U.S. still continues to be technically at war since early 1950s.  Comparisons are bound to be made with President Nixon’s 1972 visit to People’s Republic of China which was the only other instance where a serving U.S. president had visited an unrecognised state.

But while the first look at Trump’s optics make Nixon’s visit look pale in terms of media coverage, last three Trump-Kim summits provide no hope of being as historic and transformative. The fact that President Xi Jinping today promises to play a constructive role in sustaining U.S.-North Korea negotiations speaks volumes on how the substance of Nixon’s China visit had transform not just U.S.-China equations but also the very fundamentals of contemporary world order.

AS for President Donald Trump he has already held three summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un who in 2017 he had rubbished as ‘little rocket man’ threatening him with ‘fire and fury’ that world has never seen and to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea. This sabre-rattling by President Trump was then responded by young Kim Jong-un not only with his equally nasty epithets calling Trump as a ‘mentally deranged U.S. dotard’ but accompanying his words with spectre of testing of his nuclear weapons and long range missiles demonstrating their reach to U.S. territories. This was to change Trump’s strategy to its exact opposite, falling in love with so-called North Korean dictator.

 This U-turn in 2018 was to see President Trump travel twice halfway across the global to meet the North Korean leader, Chairman Kim Jong-un, first in Singapore in June last year and then this February in Hanoi, Vietnam. Their first summit was largely a familiarising (read measuring up each other) exercise and ended with a very general statement on seeking denuclearisation of Korean peninsula. Even then, the accompanying tweets of President Trump however had already begun to rattle long-term U.S. allies South Korea and Japan as they had raised the spectre of Trump linking North Korea’s denuclearisation with U.S. withdrawing its troops stationed in these two countries and even stopping biannual military exercises calling these as ‘expensive’ which underlined Kim’s enormous bargaining skills.

 Their second summit in Hanoi this February was a disaster as it ended abruptly without the two even issuing any statement. So much so that media had speculated Kim having banished his negotiating team to gallows, even having excited some of them.  All this has apparently further deflated President Trump’s expectations from Kim to the very minimum: of just ensuring continued engagement with Kim at all costs and seeking nothing more than just his agreeing to maintain moratorium on testing his nuclear weapons and longer-range missiles. So much so that this rapid drift in Trump’s objectives and negotiating strategy are beginning to show cracks in his own negotiating team. Hardiness like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo or his National Security Advisor John Bolton are not able to keep pace with President’s inexplicable leaning in favour of Kim regime.

It is in this backdrop of the rapidly deflating ambitions of President Donald Trump that his recent third summit with Kim Jong-un took place. It was not only initiated with Trump’s unsolicited public invite on his last Saturday morning tweet asking Kim to meet at the DMZ (demilitarised zone between North and South Korea) but saw President Trump actually cross the demarcation line and enter North Korea and then have a nearly hour-long meeting with nothing concrete to boast about as his take away from this exercise. If anything it was Kim who appeared gracious enough to have responded to this short notice but gave nothing away.

 If anything these three summits have seen President Trump move Kim Jong-un from once being a pariah ruler of his hermit kingdom to one who has had about a dozen summit meetings with world leaders in the last one year, something that puts him at the very center-stage of debates on international affairs. For President Trump, these have demonstrated a clear failure of his diplomacy and negotiating skills. Indeed, this saw him last Sunday stoop further and belittle himself by falsely claiming that his predecessor President Obama had been desperately seeking meetings with Chairman Kim whereas he has not only managed three summits but also evolved a ‘certain chemistry’ with Kim Jong-un. This claim, of course, has been widely condemned by one and all, including from several of his Republican party comrades.

 In what direction are these negotiations likely to proceed from here? While their first summit had witnessed both leaders committing very broadly to the ‘denuclearisation of Korean peninsula’, the second summit had failed to define any specifics of what that had meant. And now, their third summit last Sunday had no mention of nuclear weapons! Not just that. This third Trump-Kim summit was preceded by Trump’s press conference in Seoul where he had stressed on how Kim Jong-un has not tested any nuclear weapons since they begin their talks in Singapore in June last year. For him, it did not matter that Kim has lately renewed his testing of short-range missiles and reportedly renewed rebuilding of his nuclear and missile facilities. Some of these were dismantled last year as part of Kim’s negotiating strategy.

 Second, in his Seoul press conference, President Trump was also seen laying stress on his personal chemistry with Kim. This is believed to having lowered the tempers from their brinkmanship of 2017. This effort at building chemistry saw President Trump not raise any of those contentious issues at his third summit with Kim. This strategy of agreeing to disagree smacks of a superpower seeking refuge in building an artificial bonhomie just for the sake of building it at any price. President Trump’s strategy now seems geared to achieving no more than a freeze on Kim’s arsenals of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Obviously this has had huge geo-strategic costs to keep President Trump in media headlines for his self-praising tweets bereft of any logic.

 The most dangerous outcome of this rapid drift in President Trump’s negotiating strategy with Kim remains its re-enforcing the ‘currency of power’ justification underlining the invincibility of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. This carries a clear message to other aspirant nuclear nations, especially for rogue regimes.

 The only known outcome of this third Trump-Kim summit is their promise to revive their lower-level official negotiations. But again, no time line or date for their first round is known except that, for the Trump team, these talks will be led by Stephen Beigun, who has been U.S. Special Representative on North Korea and was seen holding his last meeting on the DMZ last Saturday night preparing for this third Trump-Kim summit. Its not still clear if Kim Hyok Chol will continue to lead the North Korea team. Media reports of him being executed following the second Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi were so widespread that North Korea had to release pictures of him sitting close to Kim watching a cultural performance to assure the world that he was alive and fine.

 Finally, President Trump also proudly claimed to have invited Kim Jong-un to visit the White House and said that this may happen sooner than later. If anything, all this clearly marks U.S. recognition of North Korea as a de facto nuclear weapon state. This has seen all the democratic presidential hopefuls for 2020 elections taking pot-shots at Trump’s foreign policy, thus further shrinking President Trump’s mandate to negotiate with the Kim regime. By all standards, therefore, the core issue of denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula has since given way to the media focus shifting on to which of these two leaders will be obligng the other by paying his first state visit. And, given the track record of the past one year, President Donald Trump and his family seems more likely to pay a visit to Residence 55 — Ryongsong Central Luxury Mansion of the Kim family.

(The author is professor of Diplomacy and Disarmament at School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)

Aditi Bhaduri

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