Soon President Trump will sit down with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, but it’s still not clear whether he will raise the issue of human rights in the Hermit Kingdom. He should.
North Korea wants to earn the respect of the world as a real middle power, while the United States wants a better behaving, ideally non-nuclear or at least less threatening regime there. A discussion of human rights is essential to both. But by taking them off the table, the Trump administration would elevate North Korea and undercut U.S. interests. Worse, North Korea could claim moral equivalence with the West after a few days in Singapore if the topic isn’t breached.
An understanding of the fundamental nature of both regimes is critical to achieving the desired result. The U.S. is supposed to be the last best hope for mankind, a republic grounded in and dedicated to the preservation of the sovereignty of the individual. North Korea is the worst example of man violently turned loose upon man, a regime where citizen-slaves labor to prop up their leader.
Ignoring those differences and implicitly granting moral equivalence in the process, Trump would weaken his hand. He should copy Ronald Reagan instead.
[Opinion: Trump plays hardball on North Korea summit, just like Reagan did]
It’s true that at first the Reagan administration looked down at the human rights policies of President Jimmy Carter as impractical and harmful to American interests. But a State Department memo allegedly authored by Elliot Abrams, then an assistant secretary of state, changed the paradigm early on.
Both a means and an end, according to the memo, human rights would become part of “the core of our foreign policy.” In the fight between East and West, human rights would become “the best opportunity to convey what is ultimately at issue in our contest with the Soviet bloc.” That was the idea when Reagan declared the USSR an “evil empire” and laid bare its crimes to the world. He shamed the Soviet Union and gained the upper hand.
Trump doesn’t have to give a speech like that at this moment, but he should bring up in talks the systematic murders, the infanticides and the forced abortions, the sexual violence, the starvation and the persecution of Christians, and the brutal executions (by mortar fire, for example). Take and read the gruesome evidence in the 2017 report by the International Bar Association, which estimates that over 100,000 political prisoners are rotting behind bars in a nation of just 25 million people.
Trump accurately captured Kim’s end goal when he said the North Korean leader wants his country “to join the real world.” Supposedly it’s not just half-hearted denuclearization efforts in exchange for humanitarian aid this time. It’s about modernizing North Korea. If that’s true, a measurable first step on the road to denuclearization and citizenship in the world would be a commitment to upholding basic human rights. Trump should make it part of the conversation.
