Opportunity or trap

Pantelis Ikonomou, a former IAEA nuclear safeguards inspector, writes: 

US President Trump suddenly decided to accept a meeting with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un. Was it an erratic reaction to a long-lasting deadlock?  Or was it conscious cutting of the Gordian knot, a well-planned move towards the solution of the nuclear crisis?

Whichever, it undoubtedly represents a fundamental change in the basic US prerequisite “no dialogue without promise of complete denuclearization.” This now turns into “dialogue to achieve denuclearization.”

This change will be understood, at least by North Korea, as US policy tuning toward reality: recognizing the fact that military elimination of the country’s nuclear capabilities would be a tragic operation with no winner. Nuclear deterrence, which North Korea has long struggled for and finally achieved, has become Kim Jong-un’s strongest negotiation card.

Fifteen years after North Korea left the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) the US, as the leader of the six-party effort to solve the constantly escalating nuclear crisis, is now facing an unprecedented challenge: to negotiate a lasting end to this grave nuclear crisis. The road is not short and presents crucial obstacles, quite different from those encountered in the Iran deal. It is worth anticipating a few of them:

• While North Korea will seek recognition as a Nuclear Weapons State with a status equivalent to that of India and Pakistan, the US will call for North Korea to terminate all its nuclear tests and related nuclear activities with a possible military dimension.
• Agreement on waiving of UN and US sanctions in exchange for a verifiable and irreversible implementation of the agreed outcome.
• Accomplishing a new balance between two basic theses: “denuclearize the Korean Peninsula” and “removing the threat (US nuclear umbrella included) until Pyongyang feels secure.”

However, if president Trump’s sudden decision was just an erratic reaction distant from any rational concept or strategy, then he is walking into a risky trap, even a dangerous situation with a deeply uncertain outcome.