In late January 2019, President Trump was furious with his director of national intelligence for publicly contradicting him about the prospect of convincing North Korea to forsake its arsenal of nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles.
“We currently assess that North Korea will seek to retain its WMD capabilities,” Dan Coats testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. “It is unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities because its leaders ultimately view nuclear weapons as critical to regime survival.”
The mission of the intelligence agencies, he said parenthetically, was “to seek the truth and speak the truth.”
It was not a “truth” that Trump believed or wanted to hear, and he quickly tweeted his rebuttal.
“North Korea relationship is best it has ever been with U.S., No testing, getting remains, hostages returned. Decent chance of Denuclearization,” he wrote, adding a public rebuke of his intelligence chiefs. “Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!”
Coats, whom Trump saw as disloyal, was gone within the next six months, and the president would continue to boast of his special bond with Kim Jong Un, whom he met during a historic summit the previous summer in Singapore.
In the two years since becoming to the first sitting U.S. president to meet face-to-face with a North Korean leader, little has happened to support Trump’s claim that “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea” or, for that matter, to undercut the intelligence community’s judgment that Kim Jong Un will never give up his nuclear weapons.
Still, even skeptics like former Defense Secretary Robert Gates give Trump credit for trying.
“I supported his outreach to Kim Jong Un,” Gates told NPR in an interview that aired on the second anniversary of the Singapore summit. “Everything else we’ve tried for the preceding quarter of a century had not worked.”
But despite three meetings with Kim and Trump’s decision to order a halt to large-scale U.S. “war games,” Gates says it’s time to admit that Trump’s charm offensive has failed.
“For all the rhetoric and photo opportunities of the three summit meetings, by mid-2019, Trump had made no more progress toward North Korean denuclearization than had his three predecessors,” Gates writes in his just-published book, Exercise of Power.
“One thing seems clear: North Korea has no intention of ever completely giving up its nuclear weapons capability and the means to deliver such weapons,” writes Gates, a former CIA spymaster.
“Three generations of Kims have seen the capability as essential to the North’s — and their own — survival. Events over the past fifteen or so years can only have hardened that conviction. They observed Qaddafi give up his nuclear program and soon be eliminated; Saddam Hussein, who had no nuclear weapons, is also dead, his regime gone; and Ukraine, which gave up some 1,500 nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for guarantees of its territorial integrity from Russia, the United States, and Britain, has lost Crimea and the eastern half of its territory.”
Now, two years after his first meeting with Kim, the prospect of Trump closing any sort of deal has, in the words of North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Son Gwon, “faded away into a dark nightmare.”
“The U.S. professes to be an advocate for the improved relations with the DPRK, but in fact, it is only hell-bent on exacerbating the situation. As a result, the Korean peninsula has now turned into the world’s most dangerous hot spot steadily haunted by the ghost of nuclear war,” Ri said in a sneering statement issued on the second anniversary of the Singapore summit.
That was followed by a week of increasingly provocative denunciations of the South by Kim Jong Un’s younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, who presaged the destruction of an inter-Korea liaison office on the border, an explosion that ended any ambiguity about whether a 2018 North-South cooperation agreement was dead.
With the U.S. presidential election just five months away, there is no incentive for North Korea to do anything now but bide its time.
In his new book, former national security adviser John Bolton writes that it was a “foolish mistake” for Trump to meet with Kim and that his upbeat tweets about North Korea were “mostly laughable.”
The process was doomed from the start, argues Harry Kazianis, a Korea expert at the Center for the National Interest, because the sides had opposite starting points.
The Trump approach required North Korea to denuclearize first and get the benefits later.
“The Kim regime assumed that both sides would undertake confidence-building measures and improve relations over time, maybe even years,” says Kazianis.
“That means North Korea giving up something for sanctions relief, such as missile capabilities or a freeze on nuclear weapons production, signing some sort of deceleration ending the Korean War, opening something akin to embassies in each other’s capitals, and working towards finding, jointly, remains of soldiers lost during the Korean War. After all of that was done, Pyongyang would engage in sort of arms control that would lessen its overall nuclear weapons capabilities and potentially move towards full denuclearization — but not until there was a solid footing and trust built to do so.”
That basic lack of agreement about the way forward is what led to the sudden collapse of the second summit in Vietnam in 2019, in which Kim came prepared with modest concessions and was rebuffed by Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and began the death spiral in relations that has brought us to the current situation.
“At some point, we must come face-to-face with reality. The only way to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear program is militarily — at the cost of a major war (potentially including China) with casualties at least in the hundreds of thousands on both sides of the DMZ,” argues Gates in the chapter in his book about North Korea. “Perhaps, then, we should change the goal, lower our sights, and seek an agreement that limits the North’s nuclear weapons arsenal to a very small number of weapons.”
Gates said it’s time to consider pursuing a more limited agreement that would dismantle the North’s capability to make new weapons, ban all future testing, and establish tough verification procedures.
“I can hear hard-liners gasping in horror,” he says, “but what alternative do they have to offer?”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
