Exclusive: President Trump fancies himself a crafty, zigzagging
negotiator, but his pride in his bellicose unpredictability has brought the
North Korean crisis to the edge of a horrific calamity, as Jonathan Marshall
explains.
Anyone who says talk is cheap hasn’t tried getting President
Trump to talk with his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong Un. Not even the
specter of a war that could kill millions of people on the Korean peninsula,
Japan and now even the continental United States seems sufficient to push the
two leaders into negotiations. Both sides insist on unacceptable preconditions
before they will even consider holding formal talks to reach a peaceful
settlement.
Successful negotiations might end Washington’s economic sanctions
and military preparations against North Korea, but Pyongyang demands that
outcome before it even starts talks. Two weeks ago, North Korea’s ambassador to
the United Nations, Han Tae Song, said, “As long as there is continuous hostile
policy against my country by the U.S. and as long as there are continued war
games at our doorstep, then there will not be negotiations.”
On the other hand, the fact that South Korea sent seven warships
in mid-November to join three U.S. aircraft carriers for war games off the
coast of the Korean Peninsula almost seemed calculated to keep Pyongyang away
from the bargaining table. U.S. and South Korean plans to start a massive
five-day air force exercise on Dec. 4 will
doubtless do the same. And the Trump administration’s recent designation of
North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism only reinforced Pyongyang’s
suspicion that “the United States is not serious about negotiations,” in
the words of one former Korea expert at the
State Department.
As for U.S. demands, Defense Secretary James Mattis said recently of North Korea, “So long as
they stop testing, stop developing, they don’t export their weapons, there
would be opportunity for talks.” In other words, if they capitulate first, we
will be happy to negotiate the terms of their surrender. Needless to say, North
Korea’s latest test launch of its Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile
gave the middle finger to Mattis’s demands.
Trump’s About-Face
Last year, the man who prides himself as the world’s greatest
deal maker raised hopes of peace by saying he would “absolutely” speak to
Kim, even if there were only a “10 percent or a 20 percent chance that I can
talk him out of those damn nukes.” Trump told a campaign rally in Atlanta,
“What the hell is wrong with speaking? . . . We should be eating a
hamburger on a conference table.”
A year later the President was no longer in the mood for a
hamburger, well done or otherwise. “Presidents and their administrations have
been talking to North Korea for 25 years, agreements made and massive amounts
of money paid,” Trump tweeted. “Hasn’t worked, agreements
violated before the ink was dry, making fools of U.S. negotiators. Sorry, but
only one thing will work!”
No one in their right mind believes what his tweet implied —
that war could solve the security issues raised by North Korea’s nuclear
program.
Even before that country demonstrated the potential ability to
hit the continental United States with a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile, it
had the capacity to wipe out major U.S. coastal cities like New York, Houston,
or Los Angeles with ship-borne nuclear bombs. North Korea’s massed
artillery, chemical weapons, and nuclear bombs could also wreak havoc on South
Korea and Japan, including U.S. civilians and military forces stationed there.
The result would be “tragic on an unbelievable scale,” in
the words of Defense Secretary Mattis.
Under these circumstances, setting unacceptable preconditions
for talks between the United States and North Korea is as self-defeating as the
refusal of North Vietnam and the United States to hold peace talks until 1968 —
after which they spent eight months arguing over the shape of the conference
table. According to one researcher, nearly 1,600 U.S.
soldiers lost their lives over those eight months of pointless maneuvering.
Orders of magnitude more Americans could die if talks don’t begin soon to
reduce the growing danger of preemptive or
accidental war with North Korea.
Negotiations Can Work
Contrary to Trump’s tweet — if anyone in Washington will take the
time to study some history — past negotiations with
North Korea did succeed dramatically in slowing down its nuclear program.
Thanks to citizen diplomacy by former President Jimmy Carter,
and President Bill Clinton’s realization that preemptive war was not an option,
Washington and Pyongyang negotiated a “landmark deal” in 1994. North Korea agreed to
shut down its plutonium production in return for promises of help with its
civilian nuclear energy infrastructure.
Over the next several years, the United States was able to
inspect some of North Korea’s nuclear facilities — an unheard-of concession —
and also negotiate a freeze on its missile-testing program.
Although North Korea shared in the blame, the deal eventually
unraveled in no small part because a Republican-dominated Congress refused to
allow the Clinton administration to keep its commitments. The incoming George
W. Bush administration then canceled all further talks and condemned North
Korea as part of the “axis of evil.” Said Vice President Dick Cheney, “We don’t
negotiate with evil. We defeat it.”
Eventually, multi-party talks resumed and North Korea pledged to
abandon “all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.” This time, a
blatantly hostile move by Bush’s Treasury Department to freeze North Korean
assets prompted Pyongyang to resume missile tests and trigger its first
underground nuclear explosion.
The Obama administration, for its part, foolishly
abandoned any hope of negotiations in favor of a policy of “strategic patience”
— assuming that steady application of economic sanctions would bring Pyongyang
to heel. If North Korea has proved anything, it’s that it will accept any level
of suffering to achieve security.
All those failed opportunities leave the United States and South
Korea only one real option with North Korea: to live with mutual nuclear deterrence, as we do
with China and Russia, two far stronger nuclear powers that were once deeply
hostile to the United States. It’s time — really, long past time — for both
sides to drop their preconditions and start talking about how our countries can
learn to live rather than die with each other.
Jonathan Marshall is author or co-author of five books on
international relations and history. His recent contributions to
Consortiumnews.com on Korea include “Trump’s North Korea Delusions,” “Hurtling Toward Fire and Fury,” “Risk to US from War on North Korea,” “North Korea Fears ‘Regime Change’ Strike,” “The Negotiation Option With North Korea,” and
“Behind the North Korean Nuke Crisis.”