https://www.nationalreview.com/maga...rth-korea-wins/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
“Given the hopes that President Trump’s North Korea policy had generated in the roughly 18 months leading up to Singapore, the results were little short of shocking. There is no way to sugarcoat it: Kim Jong-un and the North Korean side ran the table. After one-on-one talks with their most dangerous American adversary in decades and high-level deliberations with the “hard-line” Trump team, the North walked away with a joint communiqué that read almost as if it had been drafted by the DPRK ministry of foreign affairs.
The dimensions of North Korea’s victory in Singapore only seemed to grow in the following days, with new revelations and declarations by the two sides. What remains unclear at this writing is whether the American side fully comprehends the scale of its losses, and how Washington will eventually try to cope with the setbacks the meeting set in motion.
Kim Jong-un’s first and most obvious victory was the legitimation the summit’s pageantry accorded him and his regime. The Dear Respected Leader was treated as if he were the head of a legitimate state and indeed of a world power rather than the boss of a state-run crime cartel that a U.N. Commission of Inquiry wants to charge with crimes against humanity. In addition to the intrinsic photo-op benefit of a face-to-face with an American president who had traveled halfway across the globe to meet him, the Dear Respected Leader bathed in praise from the leader of the free world: Kim Jong-un was “a talented man who loves his country very much,” “a worthy negotiator,” and a person with whom Trump had “developed a very special bond.” Kim even garnered an invitation to the White House. These incalculably valuable gifts went entirely unreciprocated.
Second: Kim was handed a major victory in terms of what went missing from the summit agenda. For the Kim regime’s security infractions are by no means limited to its domestic nuke and missile projects.
As Professor Bruce Bechtol Jr. details in an important forthcoming book, North Korea is a WMD merchant for Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other elements in the Middle East, supporting and in turn being supported by an unholy alliance of terror agents abroad. Not unrelated, North Korea maintains immense stockpiles of chemical weapons, as Kim Jong-un’s assassination of his half-brother in a Malaysian airport with nerve agents was certainly intended to remind us. North Korea is also actively involved in cyber warfare and cyber crime, as the Sony hacking and the cyber-robbing of numerous overseas banks attest. DPRK security services routinely abduct foreign nationals — from Japan, South Korea, Europe, and maybe even America — as has been documented by HRNK, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. And then there is the nightmare of human rights under the regime — a catastrophe unparalleled in the modern world — and its commitment to eradicating the Republic of Korea, a U.N. member state.
In getting a pass on all these matters in the official record of its deliberations with Washington, North Korea scored a huge plus.
Third: Regarding the key issues that werementioned in the joint statement, the U.S. ended up adopting North Korean code language.
Until (let’s say) yesterday, the U.S. objective in the North Korean nuclear crisis was to induce the DPRK to dismantle its nuclear armaments and the industrial infrastructure for them. Likewise with long-range missiles. Thus the long-standing U.S. formulation of “CVID”: “complete verifiable irreversible denuclearization.” But because the nuclear quest is central to DPRK strategy and security, the real, existing North Korean state cannot be expected to acquiesce in CVID — ever. Thus its own alternative formulation, with which America concurred in Singapore: “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
In this sly formulation, South Korea would also have to “denuclearize” — even though it possesses no nukes and allows none on its soil. How? By cutting its military ties to its nuclear-armed ally, the U.S. And if one probes the meaning of this formulation further with North Korean interlocutors, one finds that even in this unlikely scenario, the DPRK would treat its “denuclearization” as a question of arms control — as in, if America agrees to drawing down to just 40 nukes, Pyongyang could think about doing the same. The language of “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” ensured that no tangible progress on CVID was promised in the joint statement.
Likewise the communiqué’s curious North Korean–style language about agreeing to build a “peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula. What is the difference between a “peace regime” and plain old “peace,” or, say, a peace treaty among all concerned parties? From the North Korean standpoint, a “peace regime” will not be in place until U.S. troops and defense guarantees are gone — and a peace treaty between North and South may not be part of a “peace regime,” either, because that would require the DPRK to recognize the right of the ROK to exist, a proposition it has always rejected.
Fourth: The North delivered absolutely nothing on the American wish list at the summit and offered only the vaguest of indications about any deliverables in the future. No accounting of the current nuke and missile inventory. No accounting of the defense infrastructure currently mass-producing nukes and missiles. No accounting of WMD sales and services in the Middle East, or cyber-crime activities, or counterfeiting, or drug sales. Not even a small goodwill gesture, such as the release of Japanese abductees or an admission that North Korean agents did indeed kidnap David Sneddon, a young American last seen in China, as many who have followed the case believe.
Nor did Team Trump’s much-vaunted timetable for handing over nukes and dismantling WMD facilities emerge. Quite the contrary: As Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation and others have pointed out, the joint language commits North Korea to even less than any of its previous (flagrantly violated) nuclear agreements did: less than its agreements with South Korea in 1991 and 1992; less than its Agreed Framework in 1994; less even than the miserable Joint Statement from the so-called Six-Party Talks in 2005.
With the Singapore communiqué in hand, the Dear Respected could return home and rightly claim that the Americans had not laid a glove on him. The diplomatic debacle for America, on the other hand, only seemed to grow as new details surfaced and new pronouncements about the meeting were issued.
The mystifying question of the Singapore summit is this: How could the American team make so many major-league miscalculations at a single sitting? Why would the president take the lead in subverting his own North Korea policy — the first such policy in a generation to make an inroad against the North Korean threat? A comprehensive assessment must await future historians, but we already have a few clues.
The U.S. position at the summit, to begin, betrayed poor preparation for the negotiations and an almost inexplicable unfamiliarity with the negotiating partner. In the lead-up, for example, the U.S. counted as good-faith gestures North Korea’s decommissioning of a nuke test site at Mt. Mantap that was no longer usable and a special promise to cease nuke and missile tests even though Kim had already declared at the start of the year that the DPRK was moving from testing to mass production and that further testing was not needed for now.
America’s naïveté at the summit was perhaps most vividly and embarrassingly encapsulated by a bizarre movie-trailer-style video from something called “Destiny Pictures” that the U.S. team obliged the Dear Respected Leader to watch: a short film clip fantasizing about the real-estate and technology bonanza a wealthy future North Korea could enjoy if only Pyongyang’s leadership made the decision to give up the nukes and become a peaceful state.
The provenance of this video is unclear — the U.S. National Security Council has formally taken responsibility for it, though some viewers say it practically screams “Made in South Korea” — but regardless, the product itself constituted a painfully poor job of salesmanship. No one who had heard of songbun, the control system that assigns roughly a third of North Korea’s population to a bleak fate in the “hostile classes,” could ever imagine that Kim Jong-un wants all his subjects to be rich. Nor were the producers apparently aware that Kim already has a plan in place for stimulating both national prosperity andmilitary might: It is called byungjin, or “simultaneous pursuit.”
At the end of the day, the incontrovertible fact is that President Trump showed himself to be hungry for this summit, no matter what. Whether President Moon’s flattering comments about the Nobel Peace Prize had any impact on that appetite cannot yet be determined. What is clear is that Team Trump, which had consistently avoided the sorts of mistakes previous administrations had made, stumbled into a series of North Korean negotiating traps. To judge by the evidence at hand, it would appear that the president strongly preferred the prospect of a bad deal with North Korea to no deal at all.“
“Given the hopes that President Trump’s North Korea policy had generated in the roughly 18 months leading up to Singapore, the results were little short of shocking. There is no way to sugarcoat it: Kim Jong-un and the North Korean side ran the table. After one-on-one talks with their most dangerous American adversary in decades and high-level deliberations with the “hard-line” Trump team, the North walked away with a joint communiqué that read almost as if it had been drafted by the DPRK ministry of foreign affairs.
The dimensions of North Korea’s victory in Singapore only seemed to grow in the following days, with new revelations and declarations by the two sides. What remains unclear at this writing is whether the American side fully comprehends the scale of its losses, and how Washington will eventually try to cope with the setbacks the meeting set in motion.
Kim Jong-un’s first and most obvious victory was the legitimation the summit’s pageantry accorded him and his regime. The Dear Respected Leader was treated as if he were the head of a legitimate state and indeed of a world power rather than the boss of a state-run crime cartel that a U.N. Commission of Inquiry wants to charge with crimes against humanity. In addition to the intrinsic photo-op benefit of a face-to-face with an American president who had traveled halfway across the globe to meet him, the Dear Respected Leader bathed in praise from the leader of the free world: Kim Jong-un was “a talented man who loves his country very much,” “a worthy negotiator,” and a person with whom Trump had “developed a very special bond.” Kim even garnered an invitation to the White House. These incalculably valuable gifts went entirely unreciprocated.
Second: Kim was handed a major victory in terms of what went missing from the summit agenda. For the Kim regime’s security infractions are by no means limited to its domestic nuke and missile projects.
As Professor Bruce Bechtol Jr. details in an important forthcoming book, North Korea is a WMD merchant for Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other elements in the Middle East, supporting and in turn being supported by an unholy alliance of terror agents abroad. Not unrelated, North Korea maintains immense stockpiles of chemical weapons, as Kim Jong-un’s assassination of his half-brother in a Malaysian airport with nerve agents was certainly intended to remind us. North Korea is also actively involved in cyber warfare and cyber crime, as the Sony hacking and the cyber-robbing of numerous overseas banks attest. DPRK security services routinely abduct foreign nationals — from Japan, South Korea, Europe, and maybe even America — as has been documented by HRNK, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. And then there is the nightmare of human rights under the regime — a catastrophe unparalleled in the modern world — and its commitment to eradicating the Republic of Korea, a U.N. member state.
In getting a pass on all these matters in the official record of its deliberations with Washington, North Korea scored a huge plus.
Third: Regarding the key issues that werementioned in the joint statement, the U.S. ended up adopting North Korean code language.
Until (let’s say) yesterday, the U.S. objective in the North Korean nuclear crisis was to induce the DPRK to dismantle its nuclear armaments and the industrial infrastructure for them. Likewise with long-range missiles. Thus the long-standing U.S. formulation of “CVID”: “complete verifiable irreversible denuclearization.” But because the nuclear quest is central to DPRK strategy and security, the real, existing North Korean state cannot be expected to acquiesce in CVID — ever. Thus its own alternative formulation, with which America concurred in Singapore: “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
In this sly formulation, South Korea would also have to “denuclearize” — even though it possesses no nukes and allows none on its soil. How? By cutting its military ties to its nuclear-armed ally, the U.S. And if one probes the meaning of this formulation further with North Korean interlocutors, one finds that even in this unlikely scenario, the DPRK would treat its “denuclearization” as a question of arms control — as in, if America agrees to drawing down to just 40 nukes, Pyongyang could think about doing the same. The language of “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” ensured that no tangible progress on CVID was promised in the joint statement.
Likewise the communiqué’s curious North Korean–style language about agreeing to build a “peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula. What is the difference between a “peace regime” and plain old “peace,” or, say, a peace treaty among all concerned parties? From the North Korean standpoint, a “peace regime” will not be in place until U.S. troops and defense guarantees are gone — and a peace treaty between North and South may not be part of a “peace regime,” either, because that would require the DPRK to recognize the right of the ROK to exist, a proposition it has always rejected.
Fourth: The North delivered absolutely nothing on the American wish list at the summit and offered only the vaguest of indications about any deliverables in the future. No accounting of the current nuke and missile inventory. No accounting of the defense infrastructure currently mass-producing nukes and missiles. No accounting of WMD sales and services in the Middle East, or cyber-crime activities, or counterfeiting, or drug sales. Not even a small goodwill gesture, such as the release of Japanese abductees or an admission that North Korean agents did indeed kidnap David Sneddon, a young American last seen in China, as many who have followed the case believe.
Nor did Team Trump’s much-vaunted timetable for handing over nukes and dismantling WMD facilities emerge. Quite the contrary: As Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation and others have pointed out, the joint language commits North Korea to even less than any of its previous (flagrantly violated) nuclear agreements did: less than its agreements with South Korea in 1991 and 1992; less than its Agreed Framework in 1994; less even than the miserable Joint Statement from the so-called Six-Party Talks in 2005.
With the Singapore communiqué in hand, the Dear Respected could return home and rightly claim that the Americans had not laid a glove on him. The diplomatic debacle for America, on the other hand, only seemed to grow as new details surfaced and new pronouncements about the meeting were issued.
The mystifying question of the Singapore summit is this: How could the American team make so many major-league miscalculations at a single sitting? Why would the president take the lead in subverting his own North Korea policy — the first such policy in a generation to make an inroad against the North Korean threat? A comprehensive assessment must await future historians, but we already have a few clues.
The U.S. position at the summit, to begin, betrayed poor preparation for the negotiations and an almost inexplicable unfamiliarity with the negotiating partner. In the lead-up, for example, the U.S. counted as good-faith gestures North Korea’s decommissioning of a nuke test site at Mt. Mantap that was no longer usable and a special promise to cease nuke and missile tests even though Kim had already declared at the start of the year that the DPRK was moving from testing to mass production and that further testing was not needed for now.
America’s naïveté at the summit was perhaps most vividly and embarrassingly encapsulated by a bizarre movie-trailer-style video from something called “Destiny Pictures” that the U.S. team obliged the Dear Respected Leader to watch: a short film clip fantasizing about the real-estate and technology bonanza a wealthy future North Korea could enjoy if only Pyongyang’s leadership made the decision to give up the nukes and become a peaceful state.
The provenance of this video is unclear — the U.S. National Security Council has formally taken responsibility for it, though some viewers say it practically screams “Made in South Korea” — but regardless, the product itself constituted a painfully poor job of salesmanship. No one who had heard of songbun, the control system that assigns roughly a third of North Korea’s population to a bleak fate in the “hostile classes,” could ever imagine that Kim Jong-un wants all his subjects to be rich. Nor were the producers apparently aware that Kim already has a plan in place for stimulating both national prosperity andmilitary might: It is called byungjin, or “simultaneous pursuit.”
At the end of the day, the incontrovertible fact is that President Trump showed himself to be hungry for this summit, no matter what. Whether President Moon’s flattering comments about the Nobel Peace Prize had any impact on that appetite cannot yet be determined. What is clear is that Team Trump, which had consistently avoided the sorts of mistakes previous administrations had made, stumbled into a series of North Korean negotiating traps. To judge by the evidence at hand, it would appear that the president strongly preferred the prospect of a bad deal with North Korea to no deal at all.“
