President Trump’s is following a playbook developed by Russia and China in the lead-up to a nuclear summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, according to Russia’s top diplomat.
“The developments in relations between the two Koreas and North Korea and the U.S. correspond with the ideas proposed in the Russian-Chinese roadmap,” said Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
U.S. diplomats clashed with Russian and Chinese officials repeatedly over the last 18 months, even as they heightened cooperation on North Korea sanctions. Russia and China criticized the idea of a “maximum pressure” campaign and blocked the most aggressive sanctions package developed by Western powers, while arguing that the United States bears some responsibility for the crisis on the peninsula.
“The current situation on the peninsula is not caused by any one party alone and it is not helpful to impose on any one party the responsibility of resolving the problem,” Wu Haitao, the Chinese deputy ambassador to the United Nations, said in December. “The parties concerned should move towards each other instead of engaging in mutual blaming. Still less should they try to shift their responsibility to others.”
China and Russia argued that the United States should freeze military exercises in the region in an exchange to a halt in North Korean nuclear weapons and ballistic testing. Then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson repudiated the idea.
“With respects to the talks, we will not accept preconditions. You’ve heard others called for freeze-for-freeze. We do not accept a freeze-for-freeze as a precondition,” Tillerson said at the time. “We do not accept any relaxation of the sanctions regime as a precondition of talks. We do not accept a resumption of humanitarian assistance as a precondition to talks.”
But Trump’s team recently scrapped a plan to conduct joint military exercises with South Korea involving B-52 bombers and other strategic nuclear assets, according to a Wall Street Journal report. And the president has taken a conciliatory tone in the last few days, as a flurry of diplomatic activity reversed his decision to cancel the summit.
“I don’t even want to use the term ‘maximum pressure’ anymore, because I don’t want to use that term, because we’re getting along,” Trump said last week. “It’s not a question of ‘maximum pressure.’ It’s staying essentially the way it is … I think the relationship we have right now with North Korea is as good as it has been in a long time.”
If the June 12 summit fails to produce an adequate agreement, Trump will have to maintain the international pressure campaign in order to force North Korea to denuclearize. And that could be a tall order, according to leading Korea experts.
“All the moves that Kim Jong Un has played are pretty brilliant,” Sue Mi Terry, a former top CIA analyst, told the Washington Examiner last week. “It’s already eroding, sanctions implementation. … So North Korea is already much better off than where they were in November and December.”
Lavrov argued that such developments reveal the adoption of their preferred policy. “[We proposed] a three-stage process: renouncing confrontation and confrontational rhetoric; normalizing relations between all the antagonists; and collective multilateral efforts to forge peace and stability guarantees in northeastern Asia,” he said.
