Donald Trump will ultimately have to remind his
national security adviser and secretary of state who is president if there’s to
be progress on North Korea, says Ray McGovern.
There is hope for some real
progress in U.S.-North Korean relations after Sunday morning’s unscheduled
meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un,
largely because Russia and China seem more determined than ever to facilitate
forward movement.
Sitting down before the talks began,
Kim underlined the importance of the meeting.“I hope it can be the foundation
for better things that people will not be expecting,” he said. “Our great
relationship will provide the magical power with which to overcome hardships
and obstacles in the tasks that need to be done from now on.”
Trump was equally positive speaking
of Kim:
“We’ve developed a very good
relationship and we understand each other very well. I do believe he
understands me, and I think I maybe understand him, and sometimes that can lead
to very good things.”
Trump said the two sides would
designate teams, with the U.S. team headed by special envoy Stephen Biegun
under the auspices of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to start work in the next
two to three weeks. “They’ll start a process, and we’ll see what happens,” he
said.
New Impetus
Russian President Vladimir Putin and
Chinese President Xi Jinping, who met individually with President Trump at
the G20 in Osaka, have been singing from the same sheet of Korea music —
particularly in the wake of Xi’s visit to North Korea on June 20-21. Putin’s
remarks are the most illuminating.
In an interview with The
Financial Times, Putin pointed to “the tragedies of Libya and Iraq” —
meaning, of course, what happened to each of them as they lacked a nuclear
deterrent. Applying that lesson to North Korea, Putin said,
“What we should be talking about is
not how to make North Korea disarm, but how to ensure the unconditional
security of North Korea and how to make any country, including North Korea,
feel safe and protected by international law. …”
“We should think about guarantees,
which we should use as the basis for talks with North Korea. We must take into
account the dangers arising from … the presence of nuclear weapons,” he said,
adding that if a way can be found to satisfy North Korea’s understandable
determination to protect its security, “the situation may take a turn nobody can
imagine today.”
“Whether we recognize North Korea as
a nuclear power or not, the number of nuclear charges it has will not decrease.
We must proceed from modern realities …” And those realities include
fundamental, immediate security concerns for both Russia and China. Putin put
it this way:
”[W]e have a common border, even if
a short one, with North Korea, therefore, this problem has a direct bearing on
us. The United States is located across the ocean … while we are right here, in
this region, and the North Korean nuclear range is not far away from our
border. This why this concerns us directly, and we never stop thinking about
it.”
Xi’s ‘Reasonable Expectations’
Last week in Pyongyang, Chinese
President Xi Jinping saidChina is waiting for a desired response in
stalled nuclear talks with the United States.
“North Korea would like to remain
patient, but it hopes the relevant party will meet halfway with North Korea to
explore resolution plans that accommodate each other’s reasonable concerns,” he
said.
A commentary in China’s official
Xinhua news agency said China could play a unique role in breaking the cycle of
mistrust between North Korea and the U.S, but that both sides “need to have reasonable
expectations and refrain from imposing unilateral and unrealistic demands.”
There is little doubt that the
Russians and Chinese have been comparing notes on what they see as a
potentially explosive (literally) problem in their respective backyards, the
more so inasmuch as the two countries have become allies in all but name.
On a three-day visit to Moscow in
early June, President Xi spoke of his “deep personal friendship” with Putin,
with whom he has “met nearly 30 times in the past six years.” For his part,
Putin claimed “Russian-Chinese relations have reached an unprecedented level.
It is a global partnership and strategic cooperation.”
A Fundamental Strategic Change
Whether they are “best friends” or
not, the claim of unprecedented strategic cooperation happens to be true — and
is the most fundamental change in the world strategic equation in decades.
Given the fear they share that things could get out of hand in Korea with the
mercurial Trump and his hawkish advisers calling the shots, it is a safe bet
that Putin and Xi have been coordinating closely on North Korea.
The next step could be stepped-up
efforts to persuade Trump that China and Russia can somehow guarantee continued
nuclear restraint on Pyongyang’s part, in return for U.S. agreement to move
step by step — rather than full bore — toward at least partial North Korean
denuclearization — and perhaps some relaxation in U.S. economic sanctions. Xi
and Putin may have broached that kind of deal to Trump in Osaka.
There is also a salutary sign that
President Trump has learned more about the effects of a military conflict with
North Korea, and that he has come to realize that Pyongyang already has not
only a nuclear, but also a formidable conventional deterrent: massed artillery.
“There are 35 million people in
Seoul, 25 miles away,” Trump said on Sunday. “All accessible by what they
already have in the mountains. There’s nothing like that anywhere in terms of
danger.”
Obstacles Still Formidable
Trump will have to remind his
national security adviser, John Bolton, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,
that he is the president and that he intends to take a firmer grip on reins
regarding Korean policy. Given their maladroit performance on both Iran and
Venezuela, it would, at first blush, seem easy to jettison the two super-hawks.
But this would mean running afoul of
the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academe-Think-Tank
(MICIMATT) complex, in which the corporate-controlled media play thesine-qua-nonrole
today.
In a harbinger of things to
come, The Washington Post’s initial report on the outcome of the
Trump-Kim talks contained two distortions: “Trump …
misrepresented what had been achieved, claiming that North Korea had ceased
ballistic missile tests and was continuing to send back remains of U.S.
servicemen killed in the Korean War.”
The Trump administration could
reasonably call that “fake news.” True, North Korea tested short-range
ballistic missiles last spring, but Kim’s promise to Trump was to stop
testing strategicnot tactical missiles, and North Korea has adhered
to that promise. As for the return of the remains of U.S. servicemen: True,
such remains that remain are no longer being sent back to the U.S., but it was
the U.S. that put a stop to that after the summit in Hanoi failed.
We can surely expect more
disingenuous “reporting” of that kind.
Whether Trump can stand up to the
MICIMATT on Korea remains to be seen. There is a huge amount of
arms-maker-arms-dealer profiteering going on in the Far East, as long as
tensions there can be stoked and kept at a sufficiently high level.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the
Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city
Washington. His first portfolio at CIA was referent-analyst for Soviet policy
toward China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. In retirement he co-founded Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
