Less than an hour after arriving back in the United States after a day-long trip home from the Singapore Photo Op Summit, President Trump took to Twitter to proclaim the end of the “nuclear threat” from North Korea:
WASHINGTON — President Trump returned to the United States early on Wednesday praising his diplomatic prowess after his meeting with the North Korean leader and declaring, “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat” from Pyongyang.
In a series of Twitter posts at dawn, the president projected confidence as Air Force One landed outside Washington. After his summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, in Singapore, Mr. Trump appeared to be taking a victory lap even as critics cautioned that the nuclear threat from North Korea is far from over.
But questions remained about whether the United States gave up more than it gained what had been a much-anticipated meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim.
North Korea state media reported on Wednesday that Mr. Kim won major concessions from the American president, including an agreement by Mr. Trump to a phased, “step-by-step” denuclearization process for the North, rather than the immediate dismantling of its nuclear capability.
American hard-liners like John R. Bolton, now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, have opposed that approach. In the past, Mr. Bolton had argued that the North must quickly dismantle and ship out its nuclear weapons program in its entirety, as Libya did more than a decade ago.
The official Korean Central News Agency also reported that Mr. Trump promised to eventually lift sanctions against the North and cease military exercises with South Korea.
In one tweet on Wednesday, Mr. Trump pushed back against criticism that he had handed a victory to Mr. Kim by promising to end those exercises, which he described as “war games.”
A joint statement signed by the two leaders did not include a timeline for denuclearization or details about how the North would move forward. Instead, the document — which many had hoped would be a road map for a nuclear agreement — was filled with diplomatic language that had been used in previous statements over the past 20 years.
Here are Trump’s tweets from this morning with regard to North Korea:
Just landed – a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018
Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer – sleep well tonight!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018
We save a fortune by not doing war games, as long as we are negotiating in good faith – which both sides are!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018
Contrary to Trump’s claims that he made major breakthroughs, Daniel Drezner points out the reality of the situation:
Over the long run, Singapore changed none of the fundamentals of the situation. North Korea still has a track record of agreeing to things and then reneging on its agreements. So, for that matter, does Donald Trump. It seems extremely unlikely that a regime that believes its security is intertwined with its nuclear capabilities will surrender them. It seems even more unlikely that hawks such as national security adviser John Bolton are going to roll over and not try to provoke Pyongyang again. Most important, there is no evidence that the fundamental policy preferences of the key actors (North Korea, China, the United States) have changed on this issue.
That said, the primary reason the long-term odds have not changed is because those odds were not as high as everyone thought six months ago (myself included). Back in January, Michael Horowitz and Elizabeth Saunders concluded that structural factors (capabilities, geography) limit the likelihood of actual armed conflict. None of those factors have changed after the summit either.
The Singapore summit produced great theatrics. Beyond that, everything that was said in Singapore could be easily revocable. So embrace the season of conciliatory rhetoric between president Trump and Kim Jong Un. Just realize that even if the rhetoric begins to curdle, the fundamental situation will not have changed all that much.
This goes along with what I said yesterday in the immediate aftermath of the summit. Notwithstanding the glowing rhetoric from the President, members of his Administration, and his supporters in the media and the Republican Party, there is quite honestly very little substance to what was agreed to by the two leaders, and much doubt lies ahead regarding whether or not we’ll actually see anything substantive. The primary reason for that, of course, lies in the fact that, as I’ve said before, the United States and North Korea have very different ideas of what ‘denuclearization’ means and there is nothing that came out of the meeting on Tuesday to indicate that the two sides are any closer to an agreement on that issue than they were before the summit began. Additionally, it’s worth noting that the North Koreans have agreed to “denuclearize” many times before, most notably in 1985, 1992, 1994, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2016. Each of these pledges was either a lie or proved to be entirely fruitless. Only someone who is incredibly naive would believe without evidence, as the President is asking the rest of us to do, that this time is any different. Perhaps this time will be different, but it’s going to take a lot more than smiles and mutual praise to change that.
Furthermore, as Drezner points out, Trump’s argument that the fundamental situation on the ground has changed significantly is quite simply nonsensical. Notwithstanding the heated rhetoric that we saw last year, the odds that there was ever going to be a shooting war on the North Korean peninsula were never as strong as some segments of the media and the Trump Administration made them out to be. The main reason for this, of course, is because the North Koreans have always been at least smart enough to realize that any effort on their part to reignite conflict with their neighbor to the south or the United States would lead to their ultimate destruction. No doubt, they could take a lot of South Korean civilians, and members of the American and South Korean military, down with them, but in the end, they and their Juche paradise would be destroyed. Similarly, notwithstanding President Trump’s rhetoric, it was equally clear that the United States is highly unlikely to launch a first strike against the north quite simply because it would likely trigger an overwhelming response from the DPRK that, while doomed to fail, would have the same disastrous impact on South Korea that a North Korean first strike would. None of that has changed as a result of the summit.
Moreover, as many people have noted in the day that has passed since the summit ended, nothing in the statement that President Trump and Kim Jung Un comes even close to dealing with the threat posed by North Korea’s conventional forces, the vast majority of which are based just inside the Demilitarized Zone within less than an hour’s time from one of the most populated cities in the world. The agreement reached in Singapore doesn’t speak to that issue at all and notwithstanding that fact President Trump handed the North Koreans a gift in the form of the apparent indefinite cancelation of military exercises between American and South Korean troops, exercises that were meant to be a part of the preparedness for the threat posed by a potential conventional attack from the north. That threat remains, of course, even though it’s unlikely to be carried out, and the President has handed the North a significant gift without getting anything significant in return. To the extent that North Korea was a danger prior to the Singapore Summit, and the immediacy of that threat was largely overstated in recent years, nothing about that has changed in the last forty-eight hours regardless of what the President claims.
