The case for — and against — Trump’s North Korea policy

Early on Tuesday morning, South Korea announced something surprising: they had spoken with Kim Jong Un, and he was ready to enter negotiations with the United States over their nuclear program. “The North Korean side clearly stated its willingness to denuclearize,” South Korean President Moon Jae-in said in a statement. “It made it clear that it would have no reason to keep nuclear weapons if the military threat to the North was eliminated and its security guaranteed.”

It’s not exactly clear what “eliminating” the threat to the North means, so it’s possible that North Korea is expecting something (like an end to the US-South Korea alliance) that would never happen. It’s also not clear how accurately the South Koreans were summarizing the North’s position, so it’s worth being cautious on what this means. But President Trump clearly sees it as vindication of his policy of stoking confrontation with the North:

This news and the president’s tweet brings a question that experts have been debating for months to the fore: is Trump’s North Korea policy working?

This may seem like an absurd idea. The president once said that he changed his mind on Korea policy — one of the most complex and dangerous issues in the world — after speaking to Chinese President Xi Jinping about Korean history for “10 minutes.” He regularly insults North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as “Little Rocket Man,” publicly undercuts his own secretary of state’s efforts to negotiate a solution to the nuclear standoff, and makes crude threats to attack the North on a semi-regular basis.

Yet there’s a lively debate among North Korea hands as to whether Trump’s wild unpredictability might actually pay off. Some point to the imposition of the toughest sanctions ever on North Korea, and the diplomatic rapprochement between North and South during the Olympics, as evidence that Trump has actually managed to scare the North into seeking negotiations — a position seemingly bolstered by Tuesday’s news. Others argue that we’re no closer to any kind of diplomatic solution, that the North’s willingness to talk is more likely to be a ploy than anything else, and and that Trump’s threats make a war that could kill millions more likely.

To get a sense of the arguments on both sides, I spoke with three North Korea experts: the RAND Corporation’s Bruce Bennett, the Heritage Foundation’s Bruce Klingner, and the Middlebury Institute’s Jeffrey Lewis. All three had different assessments of Trump’s policy, ranging from mostly positive (Bennett) to highly critical (Lewis) to somewhere in the middle (Klingner).

I’m not going to try to resolve the debate between these experts — it’s not even clear the debate can be resolved, given how little we actually know about what’s going on inside North Korea. Instead, I’m going to try to walk you through the arguments. What do some of America’s top North Korea experts think, and why is it that they’re divided on a Trump policy that seems (from the outside) haphazard at best?

Historically, the North has rarely negotiated in good faith: Pyongyang cheated on a 1994 nuclear agreement in which it pledged to limit its nuclear enrichment. Getting the North Koreans to seriously negotiate requires real fear of the consequences of failure to negotiate. Bennett, the RAND scholar, says a combination of ratcheted-up sanctions and a sense that Trump might actually be crazy enough to start a war might be scaring them into genuine negotiations.

“With North Korea, you have to be prepared to take extreme positions because they are prepared to compromise only when they think they’re facing an opponent who is strong and has got leverage on them,” Bennett argues. “The Trump administration campaign of maximum leverage on the North is working.”

The first two months of 2018 certainly provided evidence for Bennett’s case.

The Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, could have been a flashpoint. In November 1987, months before the South was to set to host the 1988 Summer Olympic Games, the North blew up a commercial jetliner bound for Seoul as part of an unsuccessful attempt to persuade countries not to compete.

This year was very different. The North Korean and South Korean delegations marched together in the opening ceremonies, under a flag emblazoned with a unified Korea. Their women’s hockey teams literally merged, competing as one (albeit to little success). Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s influential sister, visited the games and met with South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

Perhaps most notably, Kim extended an offer to Moon to visit the North for a leader-to-leader conversation. Kim has never hosted a South Korean leader; there have only been three such visits by a South Korean head of state to the North in nearly 20 years. Moon, a member of South Korea’s left-wing Democratic Party, seems interested in taking Kim up on his offer — a position that’s sparking tensions with Trump, who is considerably more hawkish toward Pyongyang. This now seems to have led to an offer, brokered by South Korea, from the North to negotiate with Washington.

Equally as important as what’s happened in the beginning of 2018 is what hasn’t: any military or nuclear provocations from the North.

“The North hasn’t fired a ballistic missile since November; they haven’t done a nuclear test since last September,” says Bennett. “There has been a lowering in tensions.”

According to Bennett, this owes principally to Trump’s willingness to adopt a risky, aggressive policy focusing on sanctions and threats. He thinks this approach, which the Trump administration calls “maximum pressure,” is essentially forcing the North to come to the diplomatic table.

“[This looks like] the first time in a long time that the Kim family has felt threatened. That’s an important position of leverage,” Bennett says. “If you don’t want to do military attacks, your alternative is some kind of negotiation. You’ve got to be prepared to leverage the North and be prepared to enforce the outcome of the negotiation. And, arguably, I think we are much closer to those two objectives than we have been in a long time.”

The first prong of the Trump strategy is to continue imposing new sanctions on the North. Just last week, the Trump administration imposed new sanctions designed to limit Pyongyang’s ability to ship goods outside its borders by sea. Sanctions were a key tool in getting Iran to sit down for nuclear talks during the Obama administration; in theory, they could pressure the North to come to terms as well.

Now, there are major differences between Iran and North Korea. Most importantly, Pyongyang is far less integrated into the global economy than Tehran ever was — meaning it’s harder to punish it from the outside. What’s more, dozens of countries, including China and Russia, have violated international sanctions on North Korea in the past two years by doing things like importing North Korean goods and/or purchasing weapons. That means North Korea is still able to access funds for its nuke and missile programs, among other things.

Bennett argues that this round of sanctions is different, and more biting. He points to reports, like this Radio Free Asia piece from December citing two Chinese sources with ties to Pyongyang, that the illicit slush fund North Korea uses to fund its nuclear program — called Office 39 — is dangerously depleted. Radio Free Asia’s sources credit this to United Nations sanctions, passed after Pyongyang’s last nuclear test in September 2017, prohibiting countries from allowing North Koreans to work inside their borders.

“International sanctions on North Korea have made it extremely difficult to earn foreign cash, and the slush fund is now running out,” one of RFA’s Chinese sources said.

The escalating sanctions, both American and international, dovetail with the second prong of Trump’s strategy: unyielding demands for North Korean denuclearization, and threats to use military force if they keep their weapons. Trump’s hardline position, combined with increasing economic pressure, sends a message to the North that this time, the United States means business. Trump’s crudeness, on this theory, is useful inasmuch as it signals a break from the past.

“People have complained and complained about President Trump’s language with regard to the North and his lack of presidential style,” says Bennett. “[But] the only national leader I know who is far worse in style is Kim Jong Un ... and President Trump has managed to catch his attention by echoing some of his style. With North Korea, that’s important: You’re not going to get results unless they think this is serious.”

The other two experts I spoke to, Heritage’s Klingner and Monterey’s Lewis, were more skeptical that Trump was getting results.

Klingner thinks the new sanctions have certainly been a step in the right direction but still aren’t strong enough to seriously threaten North Korea’s economy. “The maximum pressure is not maximum pressure,” he argues. “This administration, like previous administrations, is talking big on sanctions but underperforming.”

Iran is once again a useful analogy. Before negotiations on the Iran nuclear deal began, the United States imposed what are called “secondary sanctions” — sanctions that didn’t target Iran directly, but rather certain third parties (like European banks) that chose to do business with Iran. This was an important source of pressure on the Islamic Republic, as it severely limited Iranian access to international markets.

In the case of North Korea, secondary sanctions targeting specific Chinese banks — a vital source of foreign currency for the North — could theoretically bite hard as well. Yet the Trump administration has not imposed such secondary sanctions, which means that it simply isn’t pursuing a “maximum pressure” policy.

Now, there are perfectly legitimate reasons why Trump might not want to put secondary sanctions on Chinese banks, starting with the fact that it could spark a crisis in US-Chinese relations. Either way, many experts say that refusing to sanction those institutions means North Korea isn’t feeling much real pain just yet. Lewis dismisses the (thinly sourced) reports of North Korea running out of cash that Bennett pointed to as just talk.

“It’s certainly the case that sanctions piss off the North Koreans; I don’t want to pretend they don’t,” Lewis said. “But aggravating someone isn’t the same as creating so much pressure that they’re willing to do self-harm, and that’s really how the North Koreans look at giving up their nuclear weapons at this point.”

If North Korea isn’t actually being hurt by the new sanctions, then it’s hard to imagine that they’re feeling pressure to make concessions on an issue as big as nukes. This casts North Korea’s outreach to the South and offer to negotiate in a different light: It looks more like a charm offensive cleverly designed to drive a wedge between the United States and South Korea.

Kim Jong Un’s father, Kim Jong Il, had a long history of alternating between belligerency and diplomatic outreach. This was partly an extortion racket: The North would scare the world with something like a weapons test or a threat to attack the South, and then demand some kind of concession, like food aid, in exchange for backing down. It was also partly an attempt to simply try different strategies; to see whether being naughty or nice would better advance North Korea’s strategic position.

So far, Kim Jong Un has been almost exclusively naughty — conducting missile tests at a rapid clip with very little in the way of diplomatic outreach. The current outbreak of diplomacy might be less a response to Trump’s pressure campaign and more a product of Pyongyang’s reversion to its more classic diplomatic approach.

“Kim Jong Un had really only been doing one page out of the two-page playbook for the last five years, and now he’s doing the second page — the charm offensive,” Klingner says. “[Trump defenders] are maybe inferring causality where none exists.”

If this read is correct, then Trump’s loud threats to attack North Korea are actually playing into Kim’s hands. Moon, the South Korean president, is a dove who strongly opposes any US strike on North Korea. The harder the American line on North Korea gets, the more worried Moon gets — giving him an incentive to engage with the North as much as possible in a bid to head off war. In essence, US policy is pushing the South to play along with the North even though the latter’s diplomatic opening might be a pure PR exercise.

“We’re terrifying our allies into giving concessions to the North Koreans,” Lewis says. “The cost of the reduction in tension at the moment is the decline of the US-[South Korea] relationship.”

The long-term threat here is a fracturing of the US-South Korea alliance. If the US continues to make scary noises toward the North, ones that raise tensions, the South Koreans might conclude that the risk of the United States dragging them into a war they don’t want isn’t worth the benefits of an alliance.

This plays into a long-term North Korean strategy to “decouple” the US-South Korea alliance: making America’s pledge to defend the South seem hollow. North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program is designed to pose a threat to the US homeland, introducing doubt as to whether the United States would be willing to trade one of its own cities for Seoul. This already puts pressure on the alliance; the threat of the US dragging South Korea into a war weakens ties from another angle.

The contrast between Trump’s belligerency and Moon’s pacifism has given the North a unique opportunity to undercut the alliance. Trump may be doing long-term damage to America’s position on the Koreas in exchange for diplomatic “gains” that may soon be ephemeral.

The reason there’s such disagreement among experts about the effects of Trump’s policy is that so much hinges on what’s happening inside North Korea. The country is an information black hole; there’s no independent media to speak of, and anyone who leaks information could well be executed. It’s just very hard to get a clear read on what Pyongyang is thinking at any point in time, or even what the real state of their economy or military is.

But there is one thing that experts agree on, whether their assessment of Trump’s policy is positive or negative: It is increasing the risk of conflict with the North.

Some, like Klingner, believe the Trump administration is seriously considering an unprovoked attack on North Korea.

“When I was in Seoul, I had South Korean government officials reach out to me because they knew I was in town — to convey their concern [about an attack],” he says. “Many of us think we’re closer to war than at any time since 1994.”

Lewis and Bennett are more skeptical, but they do think that constantly threatening Pyongyang makes it more paranoid — and thus more likely to misread American intentions and react dangerously in the event of a crisis.

There’s an opportunity for precisely such a downward spiral coming up. Annual US and South Korean military exercises called Foal Eagle were scheduled to take place during the Olympics; the two sides agreed to postpone the exercises until after the games. According to the South Korean press, they’re likely to be rescheduled for sometime in the last two weeks of March.

The North is not fond of these exercises, which essentially simulate war with Pyongyang. So it’s possible they could respond with another missile test or similarly provocative action, like shelling South Korean territory. And that could set off a really dangerous spiral.

The key difference between experts here is that Bennett thinks it’s worth creating a somewhat higher risk of war in order to try to pressure the North. The situation will keep getting worse, he argues, and so we need to take some risks now to prevent greater ones from arising down the line.

“There could be some misunderstanding, some bad call on one side or another,” he says. “The question is: If we get out to 2030 and North Korea has, let’s say, 200 nuclear weapons and 30 ICBMs, are we prepared to live with that world?”

Lewis, by contrast, believes the risks of a war — which could literally kill millions — are far too high for such dubious gains. “We’re paying a lot for the situation to get worse,” he says.

We should all hope that Bennett is right — and fear the possibility that Lewis might be.