Peter Beinhart Jun 15, 2018<\/p>\n
The Singapore summit actually made the world a safer place. The president\u2019s critics won\u2019t admit it.<\/p>\n
For congressional Democrats, it\u2019s payback time. Ever since 2015, when Barack Obama struck a nuclear deal with Iran, prominent Republicans\u2014including Donald Trump and his top foreign policy advisers\u2014have accused Obama and his Democratic supporters of, in Mike Pompeo\u2019s words, \u201csurrender<\/a>.\u201d They\u2019ve accused Obama of signing a deal that doesn\u2019t meaningfully restrain Iran\u2019s nuclear ambitions and, by seeking a warmer relationship with its regime, of betraying Iran\u2019s long-suffering people.<\/p>\n The irony, therefore, is nearly irresistible. In his nuclear summit this week in Singapore, Trump gave up more\u2014and got less\u2014than Obama did with Iran. He flattered Kim Jong Un in ways Obama never flattered Hassan Rouhani or Ayatollah Khamenei. And so, having been offered a free shot on goal, congressional Democrats are taking it. It\u2019s satisfying to expose your political adversaries as frauds.<\/p>\n But the Democrats are wrong. They\u2019re not wrong that Trump proved a weaker, dumber negotiator than Obama. They\u2019re wrong to suggest that makes the Singapore summit a failure. In their desire to prove themselves savvy and tough, Democrats are proving myopic. And they\u2019re making themselves de facto allies of ultra-hawks like John Bolton, who may try to derail the Trump-Kim peace process, and revive the threat of war.<\/p>\n The Democratic criticism of Trump\u2019s behavior in Singapore has two main parts. The first is that Trump made big concessions and got little in return. \u201cWhat the United States has gained is vague and unverifiable at best,\u201d scolded<\/a>Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. \u201cWhat North Korea has gained, however, is tangible and lasting.\u201d What Schumer means is that Trump agreed to meet North Korea\u2019s leader, something other presidents have not done, and to suspend military exercises with South Korea while Kim agreed to only ambiguous, unspecific language about denuclearization.<\/p>\n But by looking at the summit in isolation, Schumer is missing the larger tradeoff. Why might North Korea pose a threat to the United States? Because it has nuclear weapons that it may soon be able to place on missiles able to reach America. That\u2019s why U.S.\u2013North Korean relations last year fell into crisis. Pyongyang was making what The Washington Post<\/em> called \u201castonishing improvements in North Korea\u2019s ballistic-missile program<\/a>,\u201d and Trump responded by threatening war.<\/p>\n North Korea ended that crisis in April. Kim publicly announced<\/a> a halt to North Korea\u2019s nuclear tests and its intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) tests even though experts have detected no evidence that Pyongyang can yet put a nuclear weapon on a missile able to hit the U.S. Schumer can dismiss that as \u201cvague and unverifiable.\u201d But it\u2019s hugely important.<\/p>\n According to Leon Sigal, the director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council, Kim did that because he wants a fundamentally different relationship with the United States. During the Cold War, Pyongyang maintained good relations with both the Soviet Union and China, and played the two against each other to maximize its independence. Since then, the USSR\u2019s demise has made North Korea overwhelmingly dependent on Beijing, its only significant ally. And Kim, Sigal argues, like his father and grandfather, doesn\u2019t like that. He fears the United States. But he also wants a rapprochement with the United States\u2014and through that, with America\u2019s allies Japan and South Korea\u2014because he believes his country will be stronger, and his regime more secure, if North Korea has more than one powerful friend.<\/p>\n The Singapore summit showed Kim that Trump is open to that. And by doing so in such a dramatic way, Trump makes it easier for Kim to push denuclearization at home. By getting the summit, Kim can tell his generals\u2014who have labored for decades building the North\u2019s nuclear program\u2014that his strategy is working. Trump shook his hand.<\/p>\n That wasn\u2019t Trump\u2019s only concession, of course. He also agreed to suspend American military exercises with South Korea. And he scandalized Democrats and many pundits by calling those exercises \u201cprovocative,\u201d which is how North Korea describes them. But many of the exercises are indeed provocative. They simulate the invasion<\/a> of North Korea and the decapitation<\/a>of its regime. And they create pressure on the North to respond with provocative actions of its own. Cancelling them makes it easier for Kim to maintain his freeze on nuclear and missile tests, and move toward a freeze on the creation of the fissile material necessary for a bomb.<\/p>\n And if he doesn\u2019t? America can always begin the exercises again. It\u2019s hard to grasp why Schumer thinks Trump\u2019s concessions are \u201ctangible and lasting\u201d but Kim\u2019s aren\u2019t. It\u2019s as easy for America to restart its military exercises as it is for North Korea to restart its missile tests.<\/p>\n The more sophisticated critique of Trump\u2019s concessions is that by embracing Kim he undermined the \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d sanctions campaign that led Kim to shift his behavior. Already, for example, China has restarted<\/a> flights to North Korea, which it suspended last November.<\/p>\n But this more sophisticated critique is probably wrong, too. It\u2019s not at all clear that Kim launched his charm offensive in response to sanctions. After all, his father and grandfather said they wanted to end hostilities with America too. It\u2019s more likely that what dictated Kim\u2019s timing was his own military schedule. By conducting missile tests last year, he created facts on the ground and enhanced his bargaining power. Those actions gave substance to Kim\u2019s claim, in his New Year\u2019s address, that North Korea is now a nuclear power. Having achieved that, he was ready to reach out.<\/p>\n The critics who say Trump should have played hard to get in the face of Kim\u2019s outreach, and thus sustained \u201cmaximum pressure,\u201d \u00a0aren\u2019t reckoning with how South Korea and China would have reacted to such behavior. Remember: Kim\u2019s charm offensive\u2014at the Olympics in February and then at the Panmunjom summit in April\u2014was directed first at Seoul, where it was rapturously reciprocated. Had Trump kept talking about fire and fury while Kim and Moon were embracing, he would have risked a major split with Seoul. \u201cMaximum pressure\u201d was possible in 2017 because Kim was testing missiles, which angered even China. Once he shifted course, it would have been difficult to maintain no matter what Trump did.<\/p>\n The second major Democratic criticism is that Trump apparently didn\u2019t pressure Kim on North Korea\u2019s horrific human-rights record. To the contrary, Trump said<\/a>, \u201cHis country does love him,\u201d which Democratic Senator Brian Schatz called<\/a>\u201cembarrassing\u201d and an \u201cabdication of American leadership.\u201d When Trump said Kim \u201cloves his country very much,\u201d Representative Steve Cohen tweeted<\/a>, \u201cLoves it so much that he has them impoverished and enslaved except for those he murders.\u201d<\/p>\n Fair enough. Trump\u2019s comments were absurd and repugnant. He should have raised human rights in Singapore. David Hawk, a former executive director of Amnesty International USA, who has written several reports on North Korea\u2019s labor camps, told me Trump, as a first step, could have asked Kim to allow representatives of the United Nations or the International Committee of the Red Cross to inspect those camps. He could also have asked Kim to stop imprisoning North Korean women who are forcibly repatriated from China and to allow families separated between North and South Korea to correspond and talk on the phone.<\/p>\n But while Democrats are right to slam Trump\u2019s palpable disregard for human rights, it\u2019s worth remembering that ending the cold war with Pyongyang, and lifting sanctions, is one of the best things America could do for the North\u2019s brutalized people. The academic literature<\/a> suggests that sanctions generally worsen human rights in the countries on which they\u2019re imposed. And last year\u2019s tightening of sanctions against North Korea appears to have had exactly that effect. In December, the UN human-rights commissioner warned<\/a> that 70 percent of North Koreans rely on international food aid but that \u201csanctions may be adversely affecting this essential help.\u201d The UN\u2019s resident coordinator in Pyongyang wrote<\/a>that\u201ccrucial relief items, including medical equipment and drugs, have been held up for months.\u201d In an attempt to comply with international sanctions, China last year delayed<\/a> the delivery of wheelchairs and water-purification tablets.<\/p>\n It\u2019s impossible to know whether the normalization of relations with the United States, and greater investment from South Korea, China, and Japan, will strengthen or weaken North Korea\u2019s totalitarian regime. But the sanctions that the United States has been piling up since the early 1990s have been wildly ineffective in loosening the Kim family\u2019s hold on power. And even if lifting them doesn\u2019t dislodge Kim either, it will at least mean North Koreans are less likely to starve.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to understand why Democrats don\u2019t want to give Trump credit. They\u2019re conditioned to believe he\u2019s lying, which he often is. And they\u2019re infuriated that he can get away with behavior\u2014like making surprise concessions and praising a brutal dictator\u2014that would have gotten Obama tarred and feathered. But in declaring the summit a failure because Kim didn\u2019t meet their rigid, and extremely ambitious, demands<\/a>, Democrats are replicating the Republicans\u2019 behavior during Obama\u2019s negotiations with Iran.<\/p>\n