The allegation from former national security adviser John Bolton that President Trump was mostly focused on the photo ops at summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ought to elicit a weary shrug. Trump’s disinterest in the halting, mundane, tedious, working-level diplomacy that would have added real substance to his flashy little denuclearization pact has long been obvious.
Trump “made no effort to understand the issues or to study why U.S. approaches to North Korea had failed over three previous presidencies,” according to a Foreign Affairs summary of Bolton’s account. Well, yeah, of course — a bombshell, this is not.
But Bolton’s claim does highlight a real issue, which is the utter mess the Trump administration has made of United States-Korean relations. Trump’s willingness to negotiate directly with Kim was promising, a chance to break the stalemate and move engagement between Washington and Pyongyang to a hopeful new place for the first time in years. Instead, the administration’s hard-line insistence on complete denuclearization as a precursor to any meaningful U.S. concessions — “Give us everything before we give you anything” — has ensured the opposite result.
We now seem to be further from peace on the Korean Peninsula than before Trump and Kim first met. Five news items from recent weeks together show how badly the administration has wasted its shot. First, North Korea blew up its joint liaison office with South Korea in June, pointedly destroying the primary physical representation of progress in intra-Korean relations.
Second, Bolton’s book also reported and, with its unflattering language, may itself contribute to deteriorating U.S.-South Korea relations. Bolton describes rising tension between Washington and Seoul over Trump’s demand of large payments for a U.S. military presence in South Korea. He depicts a Trump unconcerned with South Korean interests and more attentive to his own political fortunes than South Korean security. The U.S. fixation on denuclearization has always been at odds with South Korea’s greater attention to peace, and those strategic loci seem increasingly difficult to hold together.
Third, North Korea twice said it is unwilling to deal with Washington. Pyongyang does “not feel any need to sit face-to-face with the U.S.,” senior North Korean diplomat Choe Son Hui said this month, accusing the U.S. of treating “DPRK-U.S. dialogue as nothing more than” a distraction from domestic U.S. political troubles. The idea of another summit is “nonsensical,” added senior North Korean Foreign Ministry official Kwon Jong Gun three days later. He characterized intra-Korean relations as “bound to go further bankrupt” and U.S.-North Korean engagement as “more and more complicated.” Kwon concluded, “Explicitly speaking once again, we have no intention to sit face-to-face with U.S.”
Fourth, either ignorant of those comments or deliberately contradicting them, Trump last week expressed his belief that North Korea wants another summit and said that he does, too. “I understand they want to meet,” he announced, “and we would certainly do that.”
Finally, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun, who leads the administration’s Korea policy, visited South Korea, where he slammed both Bolton and Choe as stuck in “an old way of thinking.” Biegun denied inviting Pyongyang to a meeting on his trip but said whenever Kim “appoints a counterpart to me who is prepared and empowered to negotiate on these issues, they will find us ready at that very moment.”
To summarize, relations between North and South Korea are getting worse. Relations between South Korea and the U.S. are getting worse. Relations between the U.S. and North Korea are getting worse. And Washington is determined to stay its present course, a course that has stalled negotiations with undue attention to superficial publicity and an unrealistic and undiplomatic fixation on immediate denuclearization, while insisting it is ready and willing to talk. A more discouraging waste of the opportunity created by Trump’s initial overtures to Kim is difficult to envision.
The one spot of good news is that this stalemate, though far from ideal, is stable. Kim’s goal in obtaining a nuclear arsenal is regime survival, and as he knows he cannot survive outright war with the U.S., he is deterred by his own core interest from making an unprovoked attack on the U.S. or a close ally, such as South Korea. That deterrence should hold until more productive diplomacy can begin. But it won’t begin until the Trump administration or its successor abandons this counterproductive denuclearization demand and seeks more achievable ends instead.
Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a contributing editor at the Week. Her writing has also appeared at CNN, Politico, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Defense One, and the American Conservative, among other outlets.
