India can’t complain if Donald Trump bestows de facto legitimacy on a nuclear-armed North Korea. This country benefited from a similar piece of generous presidential showmanship during the incumbency of another chief executive of the United States, George W Bush, Jr, although the recognition of India’s status did seem long delayed to most of us. Bush’s cordiality to Dr Manmohan Singh must be as baffling for Western analysists as the sudden warmth in Mr Trump’s reponse to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un whom he used to mock as “Rocket Man”. Both contrast sharply with US hostility to nuclear-ambitious Iran.
There the comparisons end. Commentators are still arguing about what exactly the American astronaut, Neil Armstrong, meant on 20 July 1969 when he first stepped onto the Moon and delivered one of history’s most famous one-liners, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Did he say “man” or “a man”, the indefinite article lost in what has been called his thick New York Mid-Western accent? But there is no doubt that television watchers around the globe were convinced – at least to start with — that Mr Trump’s little skip over the low cement ridge across the Demilitarised Zone between North and South Korea on 30 June 2019 was equally historic. By becoming the first US president to set foot in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea which is still formally at war with many Western states, he was believed to be helping to usher in a more secure world. Instead, he may have been continuing to seek a niche for himself in posterity by sanctioning Mr Kim’s nuclear aspirations.
Washington’s present geniality to North Korea is to be contrasted with its steely animosity to Iran. Having unilaterally pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, called the “Iran Deal”, on 8 May 2018, Mr Trump now regularly threatens the Iranian leaders with “obliteration”. The agreement on which he reneged, mainly to spite its architect, his predecessor, Barack Obama, was finalised in July 2015 by Iran, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — China, France, Russia, Britain and the US — plus Germany, and the European Union. In effect rejecting the American action, the leaders of France, Germany and the UK said in a joint statement that the Security Council resolution endorsing the nuclear deal remained the “binding international legal framework for the resolution of the dispute”. Their continued support for the deal insulated Iran for a while against the impact of harsh US sanctions, but it seems that given relentless US pressure, a time is approaching when Iran and the other signatories may have to make some hard choices.
Nothing could be more different from the US-North Korea sequence where the collapse of American calculations has not been allowed to affect Mr Trump’s bubbling optimism. He hoped that the Singapore summit in June 2018 with Mr Kim would be swiftly followed by a full and complete accounting of North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction. Teams of lower-level US and North Korean negotiators would then spend the next seven months hammering out the details of “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearisation” — the goal Mr Trump had set.
Anxious to kick-start North Korea’s economic development, Mr Kim was expected to prove ready to give up the nuclear weapons his regime had spent decades and countless billions of dollars developing so that he and Mr Trump would meet in an atmosphere of burgeoning hope for their second summit in Hanoi in February. Arduous and painstaking negotiations there were expected to lead to the promised breakthrough so that the DMZ crossing on 30 June 2019 would be a proud prelude to a grinning Mr Trump, with a shyly smiling Mr Kim waddling beside his bulk, winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
It didn’t happen that way. North Korea still has not delivered an accounting of its weapons of mass destruction programmes. It has continued to build nuclear weapons and missiles, and is believed to be more potent than a year ago. Mr Kim’s only concrete concession was to allow the repatriation of some remains of American service personnel killed during the Korean War. At the same time, North Korea has stopped cooperating with the Pentagon’s human-remains recovery teams.
Mr Trump boasts that North Korea is no longer testing nuclear weapons or long-range missiles – actually, the moratorium began even before the Singapore meeting — but it does continue testing shorter-range missiles. In return, the US has discontinued major military exercises with South Korea. At Hanoi, Mr Kim demanded sanctions be lifted in return for shuttering only one of North Korea’s many nuclear plants. There have been no substantive talks in the months since, amid reports that some of North Korea’s negotiators had been purged and possibly killed. But, yes, Mr Kim has written what Mr Trump calls “beautiful” letters to him and gloats it’s like “falling in love”. So, he has invited Mr Kim to Washington.
Many people – and not just Americans – believe that Mr Kim has no intention of denuclearising. This is not to suggest the US has any right to force him. Nor can the P5 powers legally or morally claim sole monopoly of nuclear weapons. Their empowerment reflects the global balance of power at the end of the Second World War, and that needs revising in light of current reality. At the same time, it could be argued — and this may be a factor in Mr Kim’s reasoning – that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya would not have met a sorry end if they had not given up their weapons of mass destruction. Apartheid South Africa did so too but it faced no external enemies. The regime’s adversaries were all internal whom it did not want to empower. Israel retains its nuclear armoury. So do India and Pakistan. Japan can probably go nuclear at short notice. These numbers are bound to increase as time goes on. It’s beyond the capacity of the US to halt the march to nuclearisation.
Nor, as Mr Trump’s fraternisation with Mr Kim shows, does he want to. He seems prepared to turn a blind eye to developments in North Korea. Iran is a different matter because in his insecure and insensate jealousy, Mr Trump can’t bear the thought of any credit to Mr Obama. It follows that what he wants above all else is personal glory. Kim Jong-un might still be prepared to grant him that by pretending to give up his nuclear programme and making some token gestures. Donald Trump would probably be quite prepared to look the other way if the Nobel Peace Prize is dangled before his nose.
The writer is the author of several books and a regular media columnist.
