Bamboozled

President Trump’s continuing self-adulation for his meeting with Kim Jong-un is tiresome. The only real result was legitimization of a brutal dictator. America is no safer. Kim retains the missiles and nuclear weapons needed to attack the US. He’ll refrain for now from further testing, but there is little comfort in that, since he has the missile and nuclear capabilities he wants. The slick video Trump showed him of a capitalist North Korea will be of no interest to Kim, who wants to maintain a dictatorial regime. Kim may want US diplomatic recognition, an embassy, and maybe a Trump hotel he can hold hostage in Pyongyang, but he isn’t going to open up North Korea.

Trump also retreated on three important points. First, he agreed to a phased process, which is what the North Koreans have wanted, because they don’t intend to complete it. Then he failed to get the North Koreans to agree to “verifiable and irreversible” denuclearization and accepted instead in the summit communique “complete denuclearization.” Secretary of State Pompeo embarrassed himself on this point yesterday. Trump also promised suspension of “war games,” by which he seems to have meant military exercises that the US conducts with the South Koreans.

The net result is “freeze for freeze.” The North Koreans will stop testing missiles and nuclear weapons in exchange for a freeze of US military exercises while a lengthy negotiation starts. The outcome is necessarily uncertain, but no one who knows the nonproliferation business thinks the Administration will come out with something better than the Iran nuclear deal from which Trump has withdrawn. Inspection anywhere in North Korea upon evidence presented of nuclear activities? A commitment not only to get rid of the nuclear weapons but to back up enriched uranium and plutonium production so that the “breakout” time required to produce a nuclear weapon is lengthened to one year? A permanent commitment to never again seek nuclear weapons? Not even in Donald Trump’s wild imagination.

I doubt the Administration has either the will or the capability to negotiate a detailed and verifiable agreement with North Korea. The bureaucracy will try, because that’s what it does when the president commits to something. But the Administration has already set the bar low: it wants the North Koreans to act by 2020, presumably after the November election that year. Trump will be uninterested, the negotiations will bog down, and sooner or later the North Koreans will decide they are better off ditching the process. In the meanwhile, they will be deploying the nuclear weapons and missiles in their arsenal, so that when the negotiations fail they are in a position to threaten the US.

Trump needed a diplomatic triumph to boost his always needy ego. The North Koreans used it to  bamboozle him.