US President Donald Trump announced Friday that John Bolton, former US Ambassador to the UN in the Bush administration, will become his National Security Adviser from April 9. The appointment comes amidst a major White House foreign policy team shake-up as it prepares for a landmark meeting with Kim Jong-un which has been characterised by some as a ‘Nixon goes to China’ moment.
Yet, there are multiple key differences between’s Nixon’s historic trip and the potential Kim-Trump summit, the first time a sitting US president has ever met with a North Korean supreme leader. Indeed significant question marks still remain over whether the latter session will actually take place at all.
A striking factor about Trump’s decision on March 8 to meet with Kim is how spur-of-the-moment it was with little detailed preparation. By contrast, Nixon’s visit to see Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972 came after years of contact building and diplomacy by the then-US president, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, and others.
Today, it is not clear that Trump has a comprehensive, clear or coherent strategy toward the Kim meeting, and his team is going through another key change period to boot. Not only is the president replacing US National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster with Bolton — a foreign policy hawk who has called talks with Pyongyang a waste of time, and therefore advocates a pre-emptive military strike.
Trump has also fired US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who leaves office this month. Furthermore, the president’s Special Representative for North Korea Joseph Yun recently retired, and he has no ambassador in Seoul.
In this context, the end-of-May deadline for the landmark meeting is looking increasingly optimistic. With Tillerson and McMaster soon departing office, US planning for the meeting will increasingly turn to their successors — current CIA director Mike Pompeo, and Bolton respectively.
Yet Bolton will not take office until next month, and confirmation hearings for Pompeo will not start until after Easter too. And May (which will be Pompeo’s first full month in the job, should he be confirmed by the Senate) is already full of foreign policy calendar fixture dates, including the future of the Iran nuclear deal, and the moving of the US embassy in Israel to occupied Jerusalem following the president’s intensely controversial decision earlier this year.
It is not only the contrast between the Trump-North Korea and Nixon-China episodes that is striking, but also the level of preparation that the United States last undertook when planning a major engagement with a Communist regime compared to now. That is, when Barack Obama opened up the relationship with Cuba under Raul Castro.
Extensive consultations
Before Obama made his landmark 2016 trip to that country, there were extensive high-level consultations between Washington and Havana. This included many months of negotiations between the US administration and the Castro team.
The meeting with Kim contains much complexity for Trump, around US alliances, the non-proliferation regime, and what exactly will constitute “denuclearisation” on the peninsula. And it is noteworthy that Pyongyang has not yet publicly confirmed, independently, the meeting invitation to Trump which came through South Korea, nor the purported pledges relayed to Washington that Kim is “committed to denuclearisation”, that he will halt all nuclear and missile tests; and that North Korea understands that US-South Korean military drills “must continue”.
As astute US officials acknowledge, it is very likely that Kim will want to win economic and political concessions from Trump before any reduction in his nuclear capabilities, let alone committing to “full denuclearisation”. And in this context, Admiral Harry Harris, the head of the US Pacific Command, warned last week against over-optimism over the outcome of the Trump-Kim meeting. Past history indicates that Harris is right that Trump should go into the meeting with “eyes wide open” given the numerous previous US attempts to get Pyongyang to denuclearise. This includes the six party talks which fell down in 2008, mainly because North Korea refused to allow inspectors to verify that it had shut down its nuclear programmes.
Several subsequent attempts have been made to restart the talks, but all collapsed. This included in 2012 when Pyongyang launched a missile two weeks after announcing a deal with Washington that had promised food aid in return for inspections and a moratorium on rocket tests
For its part, Seoul has stressed the Trump-Kim summit will only go ahead if the right conditions are met. President Moon Jae-in, who has made peace with the North his top goal, now wants Pyongyang to take credible, verifiable, and concrete steps toward denuclearisation, and both he and Trump agree that “concrete actions”, not words, are key.
Despite all the uncertainty still surrounding the summit, one big reason it could yet go ahead and be a success is China. In announcing the historic meeting, Trump thanked President Xi Jinping saying that Beijing “continues to be helpful!”. This underlines the importance of China, North Korea’s top trading partner, which has ratcheted up the diplomatic and sanctions pressure against Pyongyang. For as long as Beijing — which has said US-North Korea relations are now “heading in the right direction” — is on board international efforts to coerce Pyongyang, these may stand a significantly greater chance of success than in the past, especially if Trump develops and follows a clear and credible negotiating strategy.
Taken overall, any eventual Trump-Kim summit would prove historic, especially if a significant agreement is struck. However, this is far from certain, and much now rests on Beijing’s political influence with Pyongyang as final preparations are made this spring for the landmark session.
Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.
