By now, it’s clear: President Trump lost his bet on North Korea. Kim Jong Un is not close to giving up his weapons and isn’t likely to do so in the future. And if anyone was still waiting for proof of that disheartening reality, it came in the from of satellite imagery revealing that North Korea was rebuilding a launch site that it had previously partially dismantled — and it might have been doing so before Kim’s meeting with Trump in Hanoi.
North Korea has played this game before, and it’s always ended the same way: a broken deal, the Kim family keeping their grip on power and nuclear ambitions, and Washington throwing up its hands in frustration.
A simple rerun of this playbook on its own wouldn’t be so bad. After all, talking with North Korea was certainly worth a try, and it’s not as if Trump didn’t know that failure wasn’t a real possibly.
The trouble is that this time, it’s not just another no-deal ending. This time, the U.S. has been played, with Trump freely handing North Korea one-sided concessions. Two meetings with the sitting U.S. president and the cancellation of U.S. military exercises with South Korea are clearly wins for Pyongyang, even if they’re not the sanctions relief that Kim was so eager to get.
Worse, the failure of the summit in Hanoi could actually make future negotiations more difficult. For both North Korea and the U.S., the lack of agreement on even first steps means that moderate advocates for making incremental progress will, as Ankit Panda and Vipin Narang point out in Foreign Affairs, likely lose to hardliners.
For Trump, the problem with taking a gamble on North Korea was not just that he could come up empty but that he could actually hurt the U.S. position to mitigate a threat with a dangerous rogue state. Unfortunately for the Trump administration and the country, that’s exactly what happened. That outcome should be a warning against diving headfirst into fraught geopolitical issues without a plan or, apparently, sufficient understanding of the situation and possible outcomes.
