On Sunday, national security adviser John Bolton told Fox News that the Trump administration would prefer to go it alone in talks with North Korea on nuclear disarmament.
Perhaps President Trump thinks that he’ll have a stronger claim to victory if he gets North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to give up his weapons on his own. Or maybe he thinks that he can get some kind of great deal for U.S. by keeping the negotiations exclusive. Either way, it’s clear that even if Washington wants one-on-one talks, North Korea certainly isn’t approaching a potential agreement by itself.
Instead, Kim has had frequent meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and even met with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week. Those meetings make clear that whatever agreement Washington and Pyongyang make, it will have Chinese and, likely, Russian fingerprints on it.
And Putin seems all too happy to exert his influence and talk up his own “chemistry” with Kim. He’s already made clear, for example, that his preference is for multiparty talks and went so far as to say that North Korea would only give up its weapons if there were a multilateral agreement.
For the U.S., those statements, as troubling as the implications of Putin’s influence in Pyongyang might be, are simply a confirmation of what was already obvious: No meaningful agreement with North Korea will work without cooperation from China and Russia among others.
That means that Trump, or more likely Bolton, will have to figure out a way to make their peace with a multilateral agreement, or at least cooperation. And, if the Trump administration hopes to have a deal to rally around before 2020, the first step is recognizing that any agreement with North Korea is going to require dealmaking beyond Pyongyang.
As nice as a U.S.-North Korea deal sounds, it’s not really an option. Kim has other plans and other influential friends.
