Let’s hope that military action is the option of last resort which it appears to currently be considering how much of a chance the Trump administration is giving the Kim regime to change their ways:
H.R. McMaster
In an interview with “Axios on HBO,” McMaster argues North Korea could directly threaten “the United States, China, Japan, the world” with its nuclear arsenal and could also engage in “nuclear blackmail.” “This regime could say [if U.S. forces] don’t go off the Korean peninsula, we’re going to threaten the use of nuclear weapons, for example.” McMaster also raises the prospect of North Korea selling its nuclear secrets, or even weapons, noting Pyongyang “was developing a nuclear weapons program for the Assad regime in Syria.” He also points to the risk of wider nuclear proliferation in Japan, South Korea and beyond, asking: “If North Korea gets a weapon, who doesn’t?” Between the lines: North Korea already has a nuclear arsenal, and many experts doubt that leader Kim Jong-un will ever give it up. McMaster says the U.S. needs to “prepare for at least the option of the use of military force” to convince Kim to denuclearize. The Trump administration has sidelined the so-called “bloody nose strategy,” though, and the president speaks warmly of Kim and his intentions.
North Korea continues to vocalize that they want a “pretend denuclearization” deal by the end of the year:
A senior North Korean official on Tuesday warned of “unwanted consequences” if Washington does not shift its policy on North Korea’s denuclearization within this year, deepening the nuclear standoff with the U.S. North Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui did not elaborate on what she meant by “unwanted consequences” that she said the U.S. does not want to see. Choe also said “North Korea remains committed to achieving denuclearization and will denuclearize in due time. But it will be possible only when the U.S. changes its current way of calculation and reestablishes its stance,” according to the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency. Choe’s remarks come after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s interview with CBS last Wednesday. Pompeo said the U.S. would “change paths” if the denuclearization talks with the North do not succeed.
You can read more at the link, but as I said before the Kim regime is likely betting that the Trump administration will give them a “pretend denuclearization” deal in order to claim credit for a foreign policy victory before the 2020 presidential election. Additionally a “pretend denuclearization” deal would keep North Korea quiet during the 2020 campaign season.
It will be interesting to see if their strategy is going to work or not.
A “good enough deal” is just code for “pretend denuclearization”:
South Korea’s proposal for a “good enough deal” with North Korea to advance the now-stalled denuclearization talks between Pyongyang and Washington is apparently gaining ground among U.S. officials and experts.
Cheong Wa Dae recently proposed a “good enough deal” as a possible alternative solution to both U.S. President Donald Trump’s “all-or-nothing” strategy and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s “small deal” approach.
Some U.S. experts have proposed “a phased approach” to break the stalemate ahead of a summit between Moon and Trump in Washington, D.C., scheduled from April 10 to 11.
The “good enough deal” assumes complete denuclearization, as outlined in Trump’s “all-or-nothing” strategy, is unrealistic.
It instead proposes a “couple of stages deal,” under which the U.S. and the North move onto the next stage and continue developing negotiations, as long as they find an agreement in the previous phase that was “good enough.”
This has all been tried before and did not work. Everyone remember the 2008 “cooling tower moment”:
South Koreans at a railway station in Seoul watch a video showing a simulation of the demolition of a cooling nuclear tower at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear complex.
As part of long and complex negotiations with the US, China and other nations over ending nuclear development in exchange for concessions, the reactor at Yongbyon was switched off last year. The facility is now being fully disabled, under the scrutiny of US experts. North Korea’s denuclearisation took another significant step forwards yesterday when it submitted a long-awaited inventory of its atomic activities, prompting the US to initiate steps to remove Pyongyang from its list of states that sponsor terrorism. The breakthrough, which will also see Washington lift some sanctions and Pyongyang demolish some of its nuclear facilities, is expected to jump-start six-party talks aimed at easing 55 years of tension on the peninsula.
The Kim regime does not care about having all the sanctions removed, all they need is partial sanctions relief. Partial relief allows money to come in to reinforce the lifestyle of the regime elite, increase funding for their military, and modernize their nuclear and missile capabilities. Notice I did not include improving the welfare of their people because that has obviously not been a priority for many decades in North Korea. Poor and marginally hungry people are easier to control.
This is why the focus for the Kim regime as well as the Moon administration in South Korea has been to reopen the Kaesong Industrial Complex and restart the Kumgang Resort tours as partial sanctions relief. The Kim regime also wants South Korean funded infrastructure improvements as well.
Kim Jong-un is willing to give the Trump administration their own “cooling tower moment” and smile for a few cameras to make this happen. However, they are not going to fully denuclearize for full full sanctions relief because they don’t need full sanctions relief. That is why I call all of this “pretend denuclearization“.
That is why I also think the Trump administration has been focusing on an all or nothing deal much to the chagrin of many so called experts.
“At this point, any realistic policy must begin with accepting the reality that complete and fully verifiable denuclearization is not a realistic prospect any time soon,” Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Hass wrote in a contribution to Project Syndicate magazine. “It need not and should not be abandoned as a long-term goal, but it cannot dominate near-term policy. An all-or-nothing policy toward North Korea will result in nothing.”
This should come as no surprise that the Moon administration is openly collaborating with North Korea for a “pretend denuclearization” deal:
South Korea is in the process of persuading the United States to accept a piecemeal deal for the North’s denuclearization, Seoul’s spy chief told the National Assembly on Friday.
According to one lawmaker who sat through a briefing by Suh Hoon, head of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), the director said the South Korean government is in the midst of “constant discussions” with the United States in regard to a denuclearization process by the North that “can only proceed piece by piece.”
“Complete denuclearization is not something that can be done immediately since it requires a gradual process,” Suh reportedly said. “But the United States and South Korean positions are not divergent.”
The step-by-step approach at the center of Seoul’s campaign is closer to the “small deal” favored by the North compared to the U.S. push for an all-in-one plan that has reduced negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang to a stalemate since the collapse of the summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, from Feb. 27 to 28.
You can read more at the link, but a piece by piece deal means that the US will drop sanctions for little to nothing in return from North Korea. We have seen this happen already twice during the Clinton and Bush administrations; this is why the Trump administration has been pushing for an all or nothing deal.
Here is what well known author and Korea expert Michael Breen has to say about the current efforts to denuclearize North Korea by the Trump administration:
The Korea Times roundtable to tackle the aftermath of the no-deal Hanoi summit between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and the U.S.’s Donald Trump is under way at the Times conference room, March 14. From right are Prof. Hwang Jae-ho, director of the Global Security Cooperation Center, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies; Asia Times correspondent Andrew Salmon; Michael Breen, author of “The New Koreans;” Michael Hay of HMP Law, who ran North Korea’s only foreign law firm; and The Korea Times digital managing editor Oh Young-jin. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul
What does North Korea want? North Korea’s leaders may be rational and consistent, but they are opaque, which leads to a lot of guessing about them. One certainty is that they want sanctions lifted. After that, it becomes unclear. Possibility number one is that they want to come in out of the cold, develop their economy and that for this they are prepared to destroy their known nuclear weapons and facilities, but retain the potential to re-arm.
Another possibility is that they plan no real change and are approaching Trump from a risk management perspective. If that is the case, they might serve up a missile launch when Trump announces his plan for re-election. A third possibility is that they still want to unify the peninsula on their own terms and see nuclear weapons as integral to this aim.
These possibilities are not mutually exclusive. But they have one thing in common ― there is a role for nuclear weapons. A fourth possibility ― that North Korea wants to give up being a nuclear power and return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with its tail between its legs ― would be nice, but appears to be the least favored by analysts.
It is precisely because it is this last scenario that the U.S. is pushing for that suggests the talks may well fail. I hope I am wrong, but the answer to our question of whether Trump is failing may well be, no, not yet.
You can read more at the link, but I think it is pretty clear what North Korea wants. First of all they want to keep their nuclear weapons not as a deterrent, but instead to unify the Korean peninsula. Remember their artillery threat on Seoul has been enough of deterrent to prevent a US attack on North Korea for decades. Remember the Kim regime has killed many American troops over the decades with no US counterattack because of this artillery threat.
So clearly the expense and political capital they have put into their nuclear weapons program is intended to give them a military advantage over South Korea. This will all factor into the future confederation that the Kim regime wants to establish with South Korea that they can use their nuclear weapons to help extort the ROK to implement once the US-ROK alliance is ended.
This is why the Kim regime wants “Pretend Denuclearization” in return for dropping sanctions, followed by a peace treaty that would ultimately lead to a US troop withdrawal to make the Confederation under North Korea’s terms fall into place.
It looks like the North Koreans are confirming what we all already knew, they never had any intention of really denuclearizing:
This AP photo shows North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui (C) speaking to diplomats in Pyongyang on March 15, 2018, flanked by her interpreter (R) and another ministry official. (Yonhap)
A senior North Korean official announced Friday that her regime is rethinking whether to continue nuclear talks with the United States and maintain a moratorium on missile tests, according to foreign news reports. Speaking at an urgent meeting with diplomats and foreign media in Pyongyang, Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui cited the U.S. attitude in the recent Hanoi summit. “We have no intention to yield to the U.S. demands (at the Hanoi summit) in any form, nor are we willing to engage in negotiations of this kind,” she was quoted as saying by Russia’s TASS news agency. The Associated Press also quoted Choe as saying that her country was deeply disappointed by the failure to strike an agreement in Hanoi late last month.
You can read more at the link, but all President Trump said during the summit was that if the Kim regime closed down all their nuclear facilities he would remove the economic sanctions. The Kim regime clearly is not ready to do that.
This time the New York Times is piling on President Trump for not reaching a deal with Kim Jong-un during the Vietnam summit:
As President Trump settled into the dining room of a French-colonial hotel in Hanoi on Thursday morning, the conversation with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader with whom he had struck up the oddest of friendships, was already turning tense. In a dinner at the Metropole Hotel the evening before, mere feet from the bomb shelter where guests took cover during the Vietnam War, Mr. Kim had resisted what Mr. Trump presented as a grand bargain: North Korea would trade all its nuclear weapons, material and facilities for an end to the American-led sanctions squeezing its economy. An American official later described this as “a proposal to go big,” a bet by Mr. Trump that his force of personality, and view of himself as a consummate dealmaker, would succeed where three previous presidents had failed. But Mr. Trump’s offer was essentially the same deal that the United States has pushed — and the North has rejected — for a quarter century. Intelligence agencies had warned him, publicly, Mr. Kim would not be willing to give up the arsenal completely. North Korea itself had said repeatedly that it would only move gradually.
Several of Mr. Trump’s own aides, led by national security adviser John R. Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, thought the chances of a grand bargain for total nuclear disarmament were virtually zero. Some questioned whether the summit meeting should go forward.
You can read more at the link, but if President Trump had struck a deal to drop sanctions in return for dismantling Yongbyon these same critics would be saying it was a bad deal for the reasons listed in this article, which it would be. That is why the only option was to get them to agree to give up all their nuclear capabilities in return for dropping sanctions even if as Mr. Bolton believed the odds were close to zero of it happening.
I have not seen anyone in the media yet discuss how President Trump is setting up Kim Jong-un for stronger actions in the future if he restarts a provocation cycle strategy. If the US has a strong reaction to a North Korean provocation, the Trump administration would have a strong case that they have tried all diplomatic measures to include canceling military exercises, not putting out provocative statements, treating Kim Jong-un with respect, and even meeting with him, not once, but twice to hash out a deal. That is why I think the Vietnam summit went forward more than hoping an almost 0% chance of a deal would be struck.
The fact that President Trump kept expectations low before the summit, so readily offered up the grand bargain, and then left quickly afterwards shows this was the strategy going in to the summit. It has now been made very clear to Kim Jong-un what the price for dropping sanctions will be and now the ball is in his court on how he wants to respond.
The AP is taking the side of the North Koreans in regards to their sanctions demands:
President Donald Trump said he walked away from his second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un because Kim demanded the U.S. lift all of its sanctions, a claim that North Korea’s delegation called a rare news conference in the middle of the night to deny. So who’s telling the truth? In this case, it seems that the North Koreans are. And it’s a demand they have been pushing for weeks in lower-level talks. (…….)
The U.N. Security Council has imposed nearly a dozen resolutions targeting North Korea, making it one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world. So Kim was indeed seeking a lot of relief — including the lifting of bans on everything from trade in metals, raw materials, luxury goods, seafood, coal exports, refined petroleum imports, raw petroleum imports. But Kim wasn’t looking for the lifting of sanctions on armaments. Those were imposed earlier, from 2006, when the North conducted its first nuclear test. For Pyongyang, that’s a key difference.
I think it is more accurate to say that the North Koreans are trying to get a lifting of all the sanctions that matter. Lifting the sanctions they want would be a huge economic boon to the Kim regime without fully denuclearizing. That money would all the regime to further modernize their military and illicit weapons programs.
Does anyone believe that Kim Jong-un really wants to denuclearize for this reason?:
Andrew Kim, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Korea Mission Center (Yonhap)
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un told U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last year that he intends to abandon his nuclear weapons program for the sake of his children, a former U.S. intelligence official said Friday. Kim made the remark when Pompeo traveled to Pyongyang in April 2018 to confirm the regime’s stated willingness to denuclearize, according to Andrew Kim, who retired at the end of last year as head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Korea Mission Center. “We asked, specifically, the director, Pompeo, asked Chairman Kim: Do you really intend to denuclearize? And the way he replied was that, the chairman said: You know, I’m a father and I’m a husband and I have children and I don’t want my children to carry the nuclear weapon in their bag to live through their entire life. That was his answer,” Kim said during a talk at Stanford University. Pompeo was director of the CIA prior to becoming secretary of state.
