In baseball it’s called “small ball.”
A batter hits a bloop single. The next hitter bunts him to second. He steals third, and finally a ground out sends him home.
It has the same outcome as a solo home run — a run scored — without the flourish or fanfare.
There are many foreign policy experts who argue that it may be time for President Trump to stop swinging for the fences and play “small ball” by working toward a freeze to break the ice in stalled denuclearization talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Except, just don’t call it a freeze, says Robert Einhorn, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He prefers “interim agreement” to make clear that it’s a first step rather than the end of the road.
In a report for the North Korea monitoring site 38 North, Einhorn suggests an agreement that would be far more comprehensive than the “small deal” proposed by Kim at the February summit in Hanoi, which would trade sanctions relief for a promise to dismantle the country’s main nuclear facility at Yongbyon.
Trump rejected that out of hand, and talks have remained at an impasse.
While “freeze” has been considered a dirty word to some of the president’s inner circle, including national security adviser John Bolton, Trump himself seems fine with a go-slow approach, so long as Pyongyang is not testing nuclear weapons or launching long range missiles capable of reaching the United States.
After Kim accepted Trump’s impromptu invitation to shake hands at Panmunjom along the Demilitarized Zone in June, Trump pronounced the prior Vietnam summit a “great meeting” that was “all part of the whole negotiation,” while touting his close relationship with the North Korean dictator.
“For some reason, we have a certain chemistry,” Trump said. “The sanctions are on, and I’m in no rush … I’m never in a rush. If you’re in a rush, you get yourself in trouble.”
Trump has shown a willingness to brush off the bellicose propaganda emanating from North Korea’s state-run media and focus instead on the “beautiful letters” he gets from Kim.
He has even sided with Kim over the issue of joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises, which the Pentagon sees as vital to maintaining readiness, and Trump has described as “ridiculous and expensive.”
Trump says the “war games” are needlessly provocative and a waste of money.
“I’ve never been a fan,” he said in August. “You know why? I don’t like paying for it.”
All of this could set the stage for something short of the “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula as a step to achieve what the U.S. has stated is the only acceptable outcome.
Einhorn believes that while not saying so publicly, the Trump administration is prepared to accept a nuclear freeze as a first step.
“It has finally come to recognize that denuclearization is inevitably a complicated, phased process that must start with a partial measure,” he writes, “and it believes the logical place to start is a freeze or cap.”
When Trump took office in 2017, he was quick to discard the Obama administration policy of “strategic patience” and replace it with a campaign of “maximum pressure.” But two years on, the strategy seems to have morphed into a hybrid that combines maximum patience with strategic pressure.
“For all its tough talk, the Trump administration’s ‘maximum pressure’ policy has never been maximum,” says Bruce Klingner, an Asia expert at the Heritage Foundation and a former CIA Korea deputy chief.
Both Klingner and Einhorn agree that any interim agreement must go far beyond the vague platitudes of the declaration that followed the first Trump-Kim summit in Singapore in 2018.
“Any agreement with North Korea must also be articulated in detailed, carefully crafted text,” says Klingner. “Past negotiations with North Korea were flawed because the U.S. and its allies, overeager to achieve an agreement, acquiesced to short, ambiguously worded agreements that paid insufficient attention to details.”
One good place to start, Klingner says, would be to require North Korea to accept the U.N. definition of denuclearization as the “complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of the regime’s weapons arsenal, fissile material, and complete nuclear programs.”
“An interim agreement should codify and make permanent the current North Korean moratorium on nuclear weapons testing, perhaps by requiring North Korea to adhere to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty,” writes Einhorn.
It should also require the verifiable shutdown of the Yongbyon test facility and a moratorium on testing not just long-range missiles, but any missile with the capability of delivering a nuclear warhead to Japan or South Korea, he says.
“The agreement itself should be multilateral, with North Korea, the United States, China, South Korea, Russia and Japan, and perhaps others (e.g., the European Union) as its parties — both to give greater international standing to the agreement and additional countries a role in implementing it and enforcing compliance.”
Klingner argues that if an interim agreement is reached, the biggest mistake would be to ease off sanctions before tangible results are verified.
“As any agreement is implemented, however, the administration must maintain, and actually increase, the pressure campaign against the regime,” he says, advocating for the U.S. to penalize Chinese banks engaged in money laundering and target Chinese shipping companies flouting U.N. restrictions on North Korean oil imports.
And he says the U.S. should make clear that certain U.S. sanctions can only be suspended if the regime makes clear progress on its atrocious human rights record.
During his latest trip to South Korea, Stephen Biegun, the administration’s point man on North Korea, said he was still waiting to hear from his North Korean counterparts about resuming working-level talks.
“We haven’t gotten back to the table as quickly as we would have hoped,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CBS. “We hope Chairman Kim will come to the table and get a better outcome. It’ll be better for the North Korean people. It’ll be better for the world.”
It’s a far cry from the words of his predecessor in an address to the U.N. in April 2017.
“Additional patience will only mean acceptance of a nuclear North Korea,” said then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
“The more we bide our time,” he said, “the sooner we will run out of it.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
