Responding to new U.S. sanctions, North Korea threatened to resume nuclear missile testing, if Washington doesn’t abide by the terms of the June 12 summit in Singapore, Malaysia. At the summit both parties agreed to work toward peaceful relations, eventually de-nuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. President Donald Trump drove a hard bargain, insisting the 34-year-old North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un immediately begin the process of disarming his nukes and ballistic missiles. Kim promised that he’d work toward de-nuclearization only if the U.S. was serious about working on peace treaty, to end the July 27, 1953 Korean War, currently locked in a 65-year-old armistice. Trump’s negotiating delegation, led by 54-year-old Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, insisted Kim disarm his nukes and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles [ICBMs] before signing a treaty.
Trump and Pompeo have operated on the belief that the Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea [DPRK] would disarm first before entering into a long-term peace agreement. Celebrating the seventh anniversary of his father’s [Kim Jong-il] death, Kim insisted that the U.S. complete a peace treaty first before expecting the DPRK to dismantle its nukes and ballistic missile program. North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency [KCNA], criticized the U.S. without mentioning Trump for a new round of sanctions, insisting “maximum pressure” would get the U.S. nowhere when it came to concessions. Whether or not the DRPK complied with the June 12 summit, it’s undeniable that Kim and Trump established a good rapport. Before the summit the two had traded barbs publicly for over a year, threatening war on the Korean Peninsula. After the summit, the world breathed more easily.
North Korea has been asking for a second summit with Kim and Trump, not content to conduct the more diplomacy with government bureaucrats. No one in the media wants to admit that Trump did a good job building rapport with Kim, preferring instead to slam Trump for not getting Kim to de-nuclearize sooner. No nuclear expert thought that would happen quickly but acknowledge the tension level had come down several notches. “They want direct talks at the top the level,” said Shin Beom-chui, director of Seoul-based Center for Security and Unification at the Asia Institute for Policy Studies. Shin thinks it wouldn’t be a bad tack to work first on a peace treaty and let the nuclear issue take care of itself. Trump and Pompeo, so far, have wanted nuclear concessions before any peace treaty. Giving Kim a peace treaty first could be a game-changer with nukes and ballistic missiles.
Trump’s hard-line approach took an abrupt U-turn June 12, where Kim and Trump bent-over backwards to show good faith. Trump got Kim to agree in principle to de-nuclearizing, though there’s some confusion what that means. Most experts in the U.S. think de-nuclearization means dismantling existing nukes, uranium-enriching centrifuges and short, medium and long-range nuclear missiles. It wasn’t that long ago Sept. 25, 2017 that North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho told the U.N. General Assembly that it was “inevitable” DPRK missiles would ht the U.S. North Korea “is extremely afraid to pursue hard-line provocations,” said Park Hwee-rhak, professor of politics at Seoul-based Kookmin University. Hwee-rhak thinks Trump’s get-tough policies have worked on the DPRK, discouraging KCNA from ratcheting up the war-mongering rhetoric.
As the Mueller probe steals Washington’s headlines, North Korea has taken a backseat, leaving diplomats from the U.S., South Korea and DPRK to continue working on a peace deal. “In that sense,” Park said. “The current U.S. strategy seems to be working on containing North Korea,” something rejected by North Korea’s foreign office. North Korea wants another summit to hash out remaining details in any long-term peace arrangement, where the U.S. and DPRK formalize their commitments to each other, including a strong U.S. commitment to economic development. Whether admitted to or not, a vast majority of North Korean’s 25.9 million people live in poverty, famine and despair, desperately needing U.S. help. Any economic assistance agreement would be taken by Kim as a positive step forward in working out the rough edges of a lasting peace deal.
North Korea needs more than “maximum pressure” and sanctions to move ahead on de-nuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. When Kim promised Trump to work toward that goal June 12, he wanted the U.S. to work first on a peace treaty formally ending the July 27, 1953 end to the Korean War. While there’s no question that the current U.N. and U.S. sanctions squeeze the North Korean economy, it also pushes Pyongyang from starting to de-nuclearize. “The U.S. should realize before it is too late that ‘maximum pressure’ would not work against us and take a sincere approach to implementing the Singapore DPRK-U.S. Joint Statement,” said KCNA. If Trump and Pompeo pivot to working on a peace treaty to officially end the Korean War, Kim would be far more amenable to follow the disarmament path. Kim wants to see less sanctions and more work on a peace treaty to start disarming.
