President Trump met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un on June 12. Kim came away from the meeting with increased stature, having gotten a US president to sit with him as an equal. In addition Trump announced the suspension of this year’s annual war games with South Korea. This concession surprised the South Korean government, the US military, and American diplomats, none of whom were told in advance of Trump’s plan.
Kim merely repeating his pledge to pursue denuclearization, making no concrete promises to Trump on that subject. In a sign of the continuing prominence the American public and military give to recovery of missing war dead, North Korea’s promise to repatriate the remains of dead US soldiers from a war that ended 65 years ago was loudly praised by Trump and officials in his government, and received prominent coverage in news reports.
Despite Trump’s loud and repeated claims that the nuclear problem with North Korea now was solved, none of the conditions the US had previously set for a resolution of the nuclear question has been met. North Korea has not agreed to inspections of its nuclear sites. It has not taken any steps to decommission its existing nuclear weapons or long-range missiles. While sanctions formally remain in place, Trump’s declaration that China’s recent relaxation of sanctions is “okay” gave a signal to China and other countries that trade with North Korea now was acceptable to the US, although Trump’s frequent changes in policy make it risky for any company to trade with North Korea.
The vague communiqué Trump and Kim signed is a dramatic contrast to the Iran agreement that Trump renounced. Iran has sent almost all of its weapons grade material out of the country and is subject to rigorous inspections of both announced and suspected sites. Iran, unlike North Korea, never built a nuclear weapon, much less tested one. Iran’s missiles do not have the range of North Korea’s.
The extreme difference in Trump’s treatment of North Korea and Iran cannot be attributed to a reasoned strategic decision on Trump’s part. No doubt, Trump’s hatred (both personal and racial) of Obama, and Trump’s resulting effort to erase any and all legacies of Obama’s presidency, plays a role in the decision to abrogate the Iran deal, against the unanimous advice of America’s allies, Russia, and even the US military high command. Trump’s close alliance with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which themselves have a de facto alliance with Israel, also spurred him to rekindle a hostile relationship with Iran.
Certainly most Republicans and more than a few Democrats in the US never accepted the nuclear deal with Iran, and that bloc was strong enough that Obama didn’t dare to bring a treaty with Iran to Congress and therefore had to rely on an executive agreement that Trump as the next president could abrogate. While opinion in Congress and within the military is divided on Iran, there has been, up until now, close to unanimity in favor of isolating North Korea and confronting it militarily. President Clinton’s limited deal with North Korea was immediately undermined by the Republican-controlled Congress, which refused to appropriate money to pay for the oil that the US promised to deliver to North Korea in return for a suspension of its nuclear program.
Trump’s willingness to suspend war games in Korea has been hailed by Bruce Cumings, the foremost US historian of Korea, in The Nation as a sign of an unprecedented openness, which Cumings believes comes from Trump’s ignorance about Korea’ s history and current situation. Regardless, Cumings along with many leftists and centrists in the US see the Trump-Kim meeting as the start of a long process of mutual confidence building, gradual moves to demilitarize the Korean peninsular, and finally a peace treaty to end the Korean War, which technically has merely been suspended for 65 years with a ceasefire.
Obviously, negotiations are better than the mutual threats and bombast that characterized the Trump-Kim relationship in 2017. What is most surprising about Trump’s move to make peace is not that Trump would break with a more than a half century policy of consistent hostility toward North Korea, thereby undermining America’s longstanding geopolitical goals of tying South Korea and Japan to the US and limiting China’s influence in East Asia. Cumings probably is correct that Trump’s ignorance led him to impulsively agree to meet with Kim and then in the meeting to agree to suspend war games and to allow North Korea to use its time honored strategy of verbally agreeing to stop a nuclear program that then continues to develop, albeit more quietly than in the years before such agreements.
The real surprise is that Trump’s concessions have not produced an outcry or sabotage, in Congress and the military, similar to that which greeted Clinton’s diplomatic initiative and that Obama feared to provoke. Trump’s interactions with North Korea are just one more instance of his disruption of existing foreign policy stances. No previous president could have gotten away with undermining the US-led system of alliances in Europe or East Asia or with unilaterally pulling back from the provocative deployment of US troops. Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party has blocked the main source of reaction against changes to the US military and foreign policy establishment’s endless efforts to maintain American global hegemony.
The US military has long played a decisive role in setting foreign policy and certainly has moved to oppose presidential foreign policy moves it deemed insufficiently aggressive. Johnson could not limit the Vietnam War, presidents from Nixon through Obama could get approval for arms control agreements with the Soviet Union or Russia only in return for massive increases in military spending on nuclear and other advanced weapons. It remains to be seen if the military will challenge Trump’s destruction of US alliances. The military more than Trump’s own ignorance and inconsistency will determine whether this opening to North Korea will last long enough to transform the warm words and grandiose but empty pledges into an actual rapprochement between the US and North Korea.
