Daily Times

The much-anticipated summit between the US President Donald Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, took place in Singapore, with saturation coverage in the international media. North Korea and its regime, generally derided as a rogue state suddenly found its leader as an international political superstar on par with the president of the US. Yesterday’s ‘little rocket man’ is now a ‘very worthy, very hard negotiator’ — even ‘honourable’.

Trump’s new found appreciation of the North Korean leader tends to legitimise Kim’s regime, both at home and abroad. Not only this, Trump has ‘committed to providing security guarantees’ to North Korea, which essentially means that the US wouldn’t seek to destabilise the Kim regime.

And to this end, the US president said that “We will be stopping the war games which will save us a tremendous amount of money, plus I think it is very provocative.”

In saying this, Trump was virtually repeating what Pyongyang has said about joint US-South Korea military exercises, including the terminology of describing them as ‘war games’ to threaten North Korea.

Of course, Kim “reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearisation” of the Korean peninsula. But what does that mean? The Korean peninsula has two state entities to include North and South Korea. Only North Korea has nuclear weapons, but South Korea has the US security cover, which would include its nuclear component, if necessary.

North Korea, generally derided as a rogue state, has suddenly found its leader as an international political superstar on par with the president of the US. Yesterday’s ‘little rocket man’ is now a ‘very worthy, very hard negotiator’ — even ‘honourable’

And when Pyongyang talks of its commitment to ‘complete denuclearisation’ of the Korean peninsula, it would imply the withdrawal of about 28,000 US troops stationed in South Korea as a security guarantee against a North Korean attack. And any harm to them from a potential North Korean attack would mean an American counter response that might include all elements of its military power.

Now that Trump has indicated that the US would withdraw from periodic joint war games with South Korea that are ‘provocative’ to North Korea, this could form the basis of follow up negotiations over the phased reduction/removal of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Trump has even indicated that his country might eventually withdraw its troops from South Korea.

Despite such unilateral pronouncements of the US president, there is no roadmap or timeframe for how the process of denuclearisation will work. It would appear that Trump is willing to go a fair bit of the way, but his unpredictability is a problem. At the same time, Pyongyang’s commitment to denuclearise is vague and of a general nature. However, Trump seems to be so impressed with Kim that he is even prepared to invite him to the White House at some appropriate time.

No wonder that North Korea is quite pleased with the way the summit panned out. According to the KCNA, its official news agency, Kim won support from Trump for “the principle of step-by-step and simultaneous action in achieving peace.” It said, “Kim Jong-un clarified the stand that if the US takes genuine measures for building trust in order to improve the DPRK-US relationship, the DPRK (North Korea) too, can continue to take additional goodwill measures of the next stage commensurate with them.” Of course, Pyongyang is taking some liberty with their presentation as there is nothing to suggest, based on reporting of the summit, that the US has used such terminology.

What next? There is nothing laid out concretely in the summit declaration regarding the follow-up. Though there is a commitment on North Korea’s part to complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, the US proviso of immediate, irreversible and verifiable denuclearisation, so much emphasised by the US before the summit, is conspicuous by its absence.

It is said to have featured in the talks and is understood between the parties. During his follow up tour of South Korea, Japan and China, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has suggested that denuclearisation should be done (substantially) by the end of President Trump’s current term (end-2020).

President Trump seems to think that it will be part of a process that might take quite some years; some have even suggested ten or more years if the process goes ahead. In the meantime, President Trump has declared the nuclear threat from North Korea over.

One would very much like to hope so, but with so little to go about how denuclearisation would proceed, it might as well turn out to be the usual Trump rhetoric of going from one extreme to another.

And in the meantime, his style of conducting diplomacy by tweets seems to be upending the post-World War-II international order, with America’s allies suddenly feeling cast off. I will come to that in a subsequent article at some point.

The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia

Published in Daily Times, June 20^th 2018.