President Trump must be careful not to excessively pressure Kim Jong Un over North Korea’s despicable human rights violations.
Yes, that sounds terrible, but I say it with two concerns in mind; first, the priority consideration of how excessive pressure would affect Trump’s ability to rapidly and verifiably dismantle Kim’s nuclear and ballistic programs. Second, the unintended consequences of humanitarian pressure and how it would actually affect North Korea’s suffering population.
[Related: White House: Trump ‘hasn’t ignored’ North Korean human rights abuses]
We need to be clear-minded here that the absolute, overriding, and unequivocal U.S. priority in these negotiations must be the elimination of Kim’s ballistic missile threat and, if possible, Kim’s nuclear program. (I doubt Kim will ever truly surrender his nuclear weapons.) Ultimately, ending Kim’s ability to launch nuclear warhead-armed ballistic missiles into space and onto Los Angeles or Washington, D.C., is far more important than ending his gulags. And with Kim likely to view an emboldened Trump focus on humanitarian concerns as a grave insult, his willingness to deal on the nuclear ballistic issue might decline.
That concern of possible offense or insult is a very real one.
After all, the North Korean regime is sustained by a totalitarian narrative that presents the Kim dynasty not simply as rulers, but as the essential constitution of the nation. This partly explains why the North Koreans are so vitriolic in their responses to perceived affronts to Kim. To accept such insults without vigorous riposte would be to entertain the notion that their power is not morally intrinsic and physically absolute.
What we might regard as a diplomatic grievance would be construed by Kim as an existential threat. It would also undercut the careful narrative Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have sought to construct in relation to their dealings with Kim: namely, that the U.S. will leave the Kim dynasty alone if they agree to remove their threat to the United States. This narrative also appears to have earned China’s cooperation in diplomatic efforts towards North Korea.
Of course, there’s another even more basic consideration here: what sort of pressure it would take to effect better humanitarian conditions for the North Korean people. History tells us that telling totalitarian dictators to be nicer doesn’t tend to produce great results. Indeed, as shown by the 1990s conflict in Bosnia and Saddam Hussein’s conduct in Iraq, ideologically absolutist rulers tend to use unpleasantness against their own people as a easy, petulant means of aggravating more powerful external powers.
Moreover, do we seriously expect Kim to listen to a prospective Trump/Pompeo complaint and say, “You know what, you’re right, I’m going to stop brutalizing millions of my fellow citizens because an American politician asked me to.”
Give me a break.
So what to do?
Well, considering the Kim dynasty’s hypersensitivity to questions of sovereign power and exigent U.S. national security concerns, the U.S. should instead focus on pushing Kim to start delivering on his Singapore summit commitments. That means inspectors on the ground and the dismantling of known North Korean missile facilities now, rather than a year from now.
In the meantime, Pompeo should impress Kim’s advisers with the notion that constructive action on human rights will receive a positive international and U.S. reaction.
But at this point, anyway, the functional human rights pressure should end there.
