Atlantic alliance shattered, Pacific next stop

Having trashed the G7 summit in Quebec, President Trump is now getting ready to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un on Tuesday. Last week President Trump said

I don’t think I have to prepare very much. It’s about attitude.

He might be right, because he has defined down the goals of the summit:

I think it’s going to be a process. But the relationships are building, and that’s a very positive thing…a beginning and a getting-to-know-you meeting-plus.

While Secretary of Defense Mattis is still declaring the American goal to be “compete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” (CVID in the trade), the President has retreated from achieving that. Under cover of the furor caused by his temporary cancellation of the meeting, he has lowered the bar. Now he is even saying he’ll know within a minute whether the summit will be successful.

CVID is not going to happen. Kim Jong-un is not giving up his nukes or his missiles, though he may limit the number of the former and the range of the latter. He’ll want in return not just relief from sanctions but also withdrawal of at least some American forces from South Korea. There is simply no better guarantee of his regime than holding on to a limited number of nukes and missiles, which ensure no invasion and no US effort at regime change.

The question is whether those possible limits can simultaneously satisfy the US, South Korea, and Japan. It doesn’t look likely. South Korea and Japan aren’t interested in limiting the range of the missiles, since that decouples their security from the US: the US will feel safe but they won’t. Nor will they be interested in US withdrawal from South Korea, since the American forces there provide a vital tripwire to ensure that the US is prepared to intervene with force if the South is invaded.

There is no way such difficult issues can or should be resolved in a meeting where Seoul and Tokyo are absent. The best Trump can do is to initiate a negotiation that will likely take years to complete. The outcome cannot be nearly as satisfactory as the Iran nuclear deal, which set back Tehran from nuclear weapons and included a permanent commitment to the international safeguards required to prevent any future nuclear weapons program. North Korea is going to remain a nuclear power with significant missile capabilities.

The worst Trump can do is sell out our South Korean and Japanese allies by agreeing to withdraw US troops from Korea and accept Pyongyang’s nuclear status. This cannot be entirely ruled out. The man is desperate for a win and cares not a whit about allies. He admires dictators and likes to break crockery. Kim Jong-un has so far played him like a fiddle. Trump might well be vulnerable to flattery and the prospect of the Nobel Prize the Norwegians will never give him. They are not as dumb as he is.

Trump did serious damage to the Atlantic alliance in the past couple of days. Let’s hope he doesn’t repeat the disaster in the Pacific.