A Position of Strength

Trump is getting lots of kudos for what appears to be progress on the North Korea front.  One congressman wants to give him the Nobel Peace Prize.  FOX News agrees, and can’t resist an opportunity to point out that Obama really didn’t do anything to deserve his.  (They do get something right occasionally.)  And now Trump’s followers have taken up the call to give the Great Leader a Nobel.  

     It’s a great story.  The North Korean regime has survived since WWII despite persistent US opposition.  And its nuclear program, especially as it began to show clear signs of success, has proven to be a thoroughly intractable problem for a series of US presidents from both parties.  But now the Great Leader has demonstrated his greatness once again.  Trump says a few mean words and waves his wiener a bit, and Rocket Man comes immediately to heel.  It’s a great story.  It’s too bad that it’s bullshit.

     Crediting Trump with Kim’s newfound enthusiasm for cooperation is much like crediting Reagan for the collapse of the USSR.  The Soviet clusterfuck was toppling off a cliff of its own making; Reagan happened along and said “Boo!” as it disappeared into the abyss.  There is a much more plausible explanation for Kim’s diplomatic maneuvers, and it doesn’t bode well for efforts to ensure that North Korea is not a nuclear power.  (Whether this is a reasonable or desirable policy is a topic for another essay.)

     Why is Kim Jong-Un suddenly so inclined toward diplomacy, after years of belligerence?  Two reasons suggest themselves.  First, he is finally able to negotiate from a position of strength.  He has, or at least he thinks he has, nuclear weapons with which to threaten targets of value to the US—either the US itself or its allies.  If the US should decide to pursue more aggressively a policy of “regime change,” Kim may not be able to stop it, but he can make it extremely costly for the US and the world.

     Second, it is obvious to anyone who reads the news that Trump is rather desperately in need of some sort of foreign policy success.  He has demonstrated his diplomatic ineptitude in virtually all his dealings with our allies and enemies.  And he hasn’t hesitated to express his admiration for dictators—Putin, Duterte, even Kim.  If Kim really does want to negotiate some sort of end to the Korean War (more on that below), Trump makes the perfect mark for whatever con he wants to run.  

     Trump’s ineptitude aside, there is really little reason to get excited about the “agreement” between Kim and Moon to formalize the end of the Korean War and pursue denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.  The war was not the result of some internal conflict in Korea that led to partition; it was a war between the US and the USSR (and later, China).  The status quo in Korea is much too politically useful to all these countries for any of them to make the sorts of concessions that might make it possible to bring a formal end to the conflict.

     And North Korea has proclaimed a willingness to give up its nuclear weapons programs before, with little result.  Now, the nuclear program is set to produce tangible results in the form of a much stronger negotiating position.  It is very unclear what Trump could promise that would incline Kim to relinquish his advantage, and even more unclear why Kim would trust anything Trump says.  Trump has already established a rationale for abandoning negotiations with Kim if they are “unfruitful,” and it hard to imagine how they could be anything else.  

     Time offers a sober analysis that supports my view that nothing much of substance is going on here.  Meanwhile, George Carlin provides a rather more unvarnished account of Trump’s foreign policy.