Make Kim Jong Un pay this ‘Victory Day’

“Artful” is not a word Americans like to confer on the North Korean leadership, since it would imply having been played by the world’s weirdest regime. But the scorecard following the June 12 summit meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un speaks for itself.

The polar opposite of the agreed “denuclearization” agreement that President Trump signed with Kim in Singapore is happening. In fact, North Korea continues methodically to advance its multifaceted nuclear programs. Another rushed Pyongyang pilgrimage by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, his third in less than 100 days, yielded all of an amorphous statement on further talks and a defiant message from Pyongyang. To date, no remains of U.S. war dead have been returned per the Trump-Kim agreement. And the U.S. administration is mired in open-ended talks that hang on Kim’s whims.

{mosads}It’s likely to get worse.

As North Korea gears up for “Victory Day” celebrations on July 27, the 65th anniversary of the signing of the armistice to the Korean War, the United States stands on the precipice of a deeper hole. North Korea will use the occasion, which it celebrates each year with pomp and ceremony, to call for a peace treaty with the United States. The current South Korean government heartily endorses the North’s proposal despite the knowledge that it’s a peace ploy to gain greater concessions such as the suspension of both U.S. and United Nations sanctions, resumption of unconditional aid, and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the region.

Pyongyang’s insistence on a peace treaty will come with sweeteners; for example, decommissioning an old rocket launch pad, agreeing to inter-Korean events such as family meetings while exhorting the South to make more concessions, and returning some remains of U.S. soldiers. They will not be easy to resist.

Simply, the unconventional North Korean tyrant, by effecting a historic summit meeting with President Trump, has outfoxed the United States into making one-sided concessions.

Despite protestations to the contrary, the will to enforce sanctions on the part of the United States, South Korea and China has been supplanted by exemptions, non-compliance, and violations. Likewise, last year’s growing momentum to isolate Pyongyang with diplomatic pressure has dissipated in the sunny atmospherics of diplomacy. And the implicit threat by the United States of the use of military force — barely credible, but still not entirely dismissible by Pyongyang — disappeared the moment President Trump impulsively agreed in March to Kim’s proposition for a meeting.

How should the United States respond?

The past quarter-century record of repeatedly falling prey to Pyongyang’s carrot-and-stick strategy makes it amply clear: Only financial constriction over several years that raises the specter of regime instability, a policy that was emerging in 2017 before effectively abandoned by President Trump in 2018, stands a chance of changing Pyongyang’s calculations.

The United States must come to grips with the rising costs of continued talks under the current circumstances. The facile “It’s either war or talks” argument perilously preempts the probability that protracted negotiations between the two sides only begets a greater calamity, as Pyongyang buys time and money with which to perfect its nuclear and missile capabilities. The false presumption that diplomacy, even if imperfect, thwarts war is Kim’s ace card.

If the United States and North Korea came to the brink of war last year, as President Trump claims, then the current diplomatic dynamic, even if without substantive merit, clearly is preferable. But the “if” in this postulate is laden with hyperbole, the gulf between having a plan of preemptive strikes and the will to execute it. The Clinton administration devised such a plan in the 1990s. But the administration shelved the plan as it determined the risk of war unbearable.

President Trump’s post-Singapore summit “admission” that he “hated to do” the “rhetoric,” that he was only bluffing at Kim last year, may not necessarily be taken at face value. At the same time, the past 65-year record of determined non-retaliation by the United States in the face of North Korea’s multiple lethal attacks on Americans and South Koreans does render the “brink of war” supposition improbable.  

Kim Jong Un today stands poised to reap further returns on his technological triumphs from last year. He will continue to dangle the possibility of denuclearization before his jittery neighbors. The United States must change this equation. The United States must realize that after six underground nuclear tests, a temporary, or even permanent, abstention from further tests does not denuclearization make, just as the two decades-old abstention from nuclear tests by India and Pakistan following their sixth in 1998 do not an amenability to denuclearization denote.

Today, as Kim mulls over the possibility of receiving Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sept. 9, Nation Founding Day, meeting Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok just days later, and attending the United Nations General Assembly in late September, accompanied by a follow-up meeting with President Trump, history is fast repeating itself as farce, while a nuclear standoff in the future becomes more and more likely. The normalization of Kim’s prior pariah status has no correlation whatsoever with Kim’s commitment to denuclearization.

President Trump is only the latest prey in Pyongyang’s artful, decades-old scheme. The Kim regime’s mix of boorish bellicosity and medieval mores inspires its adversaries to patronize, if not mock, what is a formidable foe. That President Trump fell for the same trick is particularly rueful, as no previous administration had taken the trouble to invest the time and effort to constrict the Kim regime’s overseas financial networks and fine its third-party partners to the extent it did in 2017.

The Trump administration must muster up the fortitude to forgo pageantries and raise the cost of Pyongyang’s peace ploys. On this Armistice Day, the United States must reflect on the meaning of the ultimate sacrifice of tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers who fell defending “a country they never knew and a people they never met,” as it is inscribed on a plaque in the Korean War Veterans Memorial.

President Trump must remain patient, as sanctions implementation takes years to bear effect. Only then will Washington be able to negotiate with Pyongyang from a credible position of strength. Anything less is to mar the legacy of the Korean War and bring the quarter-century-old farce that is the North Korean nuclear saga one step closer to a deadly tragedy.

Sung-Yoon Lee is Kim Koo-Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies and assistant professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Follow him on Twitter @sungyoonlee1.