Alliance pays heavy price for the Trump-Kim love-in

The world has changed. The end could be nigh for the US-led alliance system.

Donald Trump greets No Kwang Chol, minister of People’s Armed Forces of North Korea. Picture: AP

The world has changed. Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un have substituted a diplomatic contest for military threats. Immediate signs suggest three winners: Trump, whose standing at home will rise after such narcissistic deal-making; Kim, whose tactical cunning has generated more options for North Korea; and China’s Xi Jinping, now being offered strategic gains he will surely pocket.

The Singapore summit takes Trump’s showmanship to a zenith. In smashing the decades-long political freeze on the peninsula, Trump and Kim, unconventional disrupters in different ways, have created a new paradigm — a declared US-North Korea collaboration that, if successful, means a US military retreat from northeast Asia.

How do we know this? We know because Trump told us — his vision for peace equates to a US strategic retreat. This has been the position he expounded at length during the 2016 presidential campaign. It began to assume tangible form at Singapore. China and North Korea have a deep interest in making this work.

At Singapore, Trump posed as a deal-maker able to transform deadlocks and negotiate new outcomes. His aim is to smash old paradigms and open closed doors — because only he, of course, has the genius to deliver this. His focus is on America’s authoritarian rivals, not its allies. Surely the decisive message from Singapore is Trump’s belief he can transform relations with the world’s great autocrats to reduce the US strategic overreach that he complains about so much. What’s next — deals with President Xi and Vladimir Putin?

Rarely has Trump looked so seductive, narcissistic, transformative and dangerous as he did during his Singapore media conference. He began by saying it is “my honour to address the peoples of the world” with a message of hope and peace. History has taught us a great lesson: when leaders boast about peace, check out the price they are paying.

Trump and Kim have embarked on a negotiating process guaranteed to be rocky and unpredictable, with serious doubts over whether they share the same final goal. Trump praises the man he thinks he has outsmarted, offering the unqualified declaration that Kim will abandon his nuclear weapons capability.

“It’s going to happen,” Trump boasts. “It’s a very great moment in the history of the world. This is complete denuclearisation of North Korea. It is within our reach. It will happen. People thought this could never take place. It is now taking place. It is a very great day.”

Who is fooling whom? There is no reason to think Kim Jong-un will surrender his nuclear arsenal. The pledges he made at the summit have been made before by his predecessors. Why would Kim abandon his prime instrument of leverage, his country’s guiding star for decades and the policy that delivered him the Singapore summit?

Kim is no Asian Gorbachev. Sure, he wants a new debate about lifting sanctions, and the sanctions he needs eased are China’s. Sure, he wants any deal that can assist his hermit kingdom in economic terms. In the interim, Kim can offer Trump a series of concessions — short of genuine denuclearisation — while demanding (and presumably getting) concessions in return.

There is no reason to doubt that Kim’s long-run aim, by putting the US mainland at risk, has been to decouple or weaken the US-South Korea alliance — and that is also a big result for China.

Kim seems to have eliminated the military threat to his regime. Trump promised a security guarantee to North Korea for denuclearisation. He ridiculed the “fire and fury” military option he had once threatened, saying: “You have seen what was perhaps going to happen. You know Seoul has 28 million people … I think you could have lost 30 or 40 million people … we could not allow that capability from the standpoint of the United States.”

The risk of war on the peninsula is greatly diminished. Perhaps it is permanently dim­inished. This may be the enduring significance of the summit. The pivotal issue then becomes the evolving strategic order.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in Seoul the US was “hopeful” that “major disarmament” could be achieved “in the next, what is it, 2½ years”. That’s neat — in time for the next presidential election. Is Kim supposed to help Trump get re-elected? In short, there’s a long path of negotiation ahead. That may provide Kim with time and flexibility to extract concessions from the US as his new partner in peace.

The brief written agreement the leaders signed has nothing new. It is weaker on denuclearisation commitments than what North Korea agreed years ago in the 2005 six-party talks. It mirrors the April 2018 Panmunjom ­Declaration between Kim and South Korea’s Moon Jae-in that called for “complete denuclearisation”. But the summit agreement has no specifics.

There is nothing about identifying the weapon sites. Will North Korea actually provide a comprehensive account of weapon locations and facilities? Who will constitute the inspectors? Will this involve the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors? What verification discretion will they have in North Korea? What is the timetable for denuclearisation? How many years will it take?

Despite Trump’s praise of Kim as “very talented”, someone who “loves his people” and a leader whom Trump now likes and trusts, the two sides have different views on the critical issue of the negotiations and sanctions. Yet this process cannot work without mutual personal trust. This is its foundation; it is the meaning of Singapore.

Trump knows this — he is desperate to build such trust. Kim, having emerged from his isolationist cage, must engage in the nuclear diplomacy sufficient to keep the process alive while surrendering as little as possible. The upshot is bizarre: Trump and Kim now need each other.

North Korea’s state media agency said the two leaders had agreed to a step-by-step process and “simultaneous action” — surely the line China will also adopt. This is not consistent with Trump’s declaration that sanctions would remain until nuclear weapons had been removed. ­Indeed, the North Korean agency claimed Trump had agreed to lift sanctions.

At his media conference, Trump offered a variety of views — he was firm on sanctions; but he wanted quick action with sanctions coming off “soon”; then he referred to a “certain point” arriving when “I look forward to taking them off”. This is the debate Kim wants.

Pompeo, it seems, is now locked into an exacting and long-run ­nuclear negotiation with Pyongyang while Trump has raised ­expectations about another summit, establishing diplomatic relations and exchanging visits: Kim at the White House? That’s only possible with more tangibles to keep the diplomatic show on the road — for instance, Kim trading away his ICBM threat to the US mainland, giving Trump more credence for his tweet that the American people can “sleep well tonight” after his Singapore success.

There is no doubt Trump and the US will be judged by their self-declared test: complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation. How long can this pipedream be sustained? In the interim, however, don’t misjudge Trump’s seductive ability to present himself to the American people as their saviour from North Korean nukes — as the heroic deal-maker who achieved what former presidents from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama were unable to achieve.

Trump’s faith in Kim is touching but this is really about faith in himself. Trump’s message was that only he could have delivered this result. What was different this time? Why, the media asked, could Trump be confident North Korea would honour this pledge when it had dishonoured so many in the past?

“You have a different administration and different president,” Trump said. “My whole life has been deals. I have done great at it. That’s what I do. I know when somebody wants to deal and I know when somebody doesn’t. A lot of politicians don’t. That’s not their thing.” He mocked his predecessors, saying this agreement should have been done years earlier.

This is a breakthrough moment because it shows Trump prevailing by smashing the orthodoxy. Trump and Kim saw in each other the opportunity they needed to break the mould. Trump ­refused to live by the foreign policy establishment’s idea of how to deal with North Korea just as he refused to live by the domestic establishment’s rules of how to conduct policy at home.

If you are going to claim a victory, claim a massive victory. This was Trump at his media conference post-summit where he demonstrated a bizarre touch of mastery that was both comic and chilling. His showmanship created the event. His message was ­unmistakable — Kim had given up so much while “I gave up nothing”. The subtext was: I can praise Kim because he was my partner in the deal. Kim was “very smart” and a “very good negotiator”. Of course, Kim was Trump’s partner. Get it?

Trump boasted his summit with Kim had proved “that real change is indeed possible” and ­declared that “anyone can make war but only the most courageous can make peace”. He recast himself as a man of strength delivering peace, not playing the race card or abusing women.

He was devastating in rejecting critics who attacked him for holding a summit that gave Kim legitimacy and equal status with the US President: “If I have to say I’m sitting on a stage with Chairman Kim and that gets us to save 30 million lives, it could be more than that, I’m willing to sit on the stage. I’ll do whatever it takes to make the world a safer place.”

His methods leading to the summit should be noted — wave a big stick, impose trade sanctions, threaten nuclear war, tear up the rule book, embrace diplomatic disruption and, after everybody is frightened and when the chance comes, sit down, cut a new deal and create a new paradigm. This is high-stakes brinkmanship. Is this what the future holds for Trump’s dealings with Xi and Putin? Who knows?

On Iran, Trump boasted that after abandoning Obama’s ­nuclear deal, Iran “is a different country now”. He was brutal with Iran but his hope was that after the sanctions kicked in, Iran would “come back and negotiate a real deal”. Not yet — it was still too soon.

What is Trump’s strategic ­vision for the Korean peninsula? “I want to get our soldiers out,” he said. “We have 32,000 soldiers in South Korea. I would like to be able to bring them back home.” He said such withdrawal was “not part of the equation but “at some point I hope it would be”. Trump agreed to abandon military exercises involving the US and South Korea in order to seal the deal with Kim, and apparently didn’t tell Seoul beforehand.

He condemned these exercises as “tremendously expensive”, ­involving an “incredible” amount of money and complained about bombers flying from Guam to participate. This was “very expensive” and he “didn’t like it”.

Incredibly, he adopted the rhetoric of North Korea, saying such exercises with a US alliance partner were “provocative”. Since the US was now negotiating with North Korea, it was “inappropriate” to have such “war games” and Trump said Kim’s regime “very much appreciated” his decision. You bet it did.

Trump’s model seems apparent — a deal with an autocratic leader to allow a retreat from US global and hegemonic burdens. On the other hand, he seems ­impatient and frustrated in dealing with US allies. The allies irritate him; he doesn’t sign up to their so-called liberal international order. These are the people, Trump believes, who have exploited the US by getting defence on the cheap and running up trade surpluses against America.

The juxtaposition was too much: Trump praised the murderous Kim Jong-un and damned Canada’s nice Justin Trudeau while thriving in righteous indignation he generated.

At times Trump descended into fantasy. He said he thought of North Korea’s revitalisation from “a real estate prospective” — yes, they could have condos and the best hotels in the world if only Kim opened his eyes, saw the power of capitalism and the value of his real estate assets.

The Donald is not familiar with the totalitarian mind. North Korea is not moving into the US orbit. Nobody knows the end game here, probably not even the principals. Kim senses the need for change. Maybe he wants a form of detente in his own economic interests. While enticed from his shell, he would know changing a totalitarian country is the most dangerous play on earth.

As for Trump, the summit with Kim will boost him at home, fuel his ego, reinforce his ambitions as a change agent, enhance his “America first” vision, create ­oppor­tunities for America’s rivals and headaches for its friends, and prove his drive to abandon the once-great US-led ­alliance system that so shaped the globe.