Trump-Kim Talks Opportunist Diplomacy

The intention of Pyongyang to negotiate with Washington was made public by South Korea even before the North expressed its will to discuss the case with the Americans. But where do these potential negotiations go? Should they be understood as Pyongyang’s backing down from its firmly-held stances?
 
Negotiations receive China and Russia green light
 
A senior official at the South Korean president’s office has announced that the North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un is deeply interested in signing a peace deal with Americans that would pave the way for diplomatic relations between the two nations.
 
The new stance of the Korean leader is a blatant turnabout for his previous approaches that even culminated to threatening Washington with missile strikes.
 
But what happened now that the uncompromising Kim says he is ready for dialogue to settle the issues between Pyongyang and Washington?
 
Some find the softening of the North Korean tone as a result of the United Nations Security Council’s sanctions as well as the US unilateral pressures on Pyongyang, arguing that accumulation of sanctions at the end of the road has come to fruition.
 
But the fact is that the anti-North Korean sanctions are not imposed only in the past few months. The Southeast Asian state received warnings from the UN in June 1950. In the 1990s, Pyongyang was several times threatened by the US that if continued its present policy, it will face toughest sanctions of the UNSC. The ban threats came to materialization in 2006 eventually, when the nation was put on strict sanctions. But the wide-ranging restrictions were hardly effective in making its young leader bow to the US pressures and a consequent shift in Kim’s nuclear and diplomatic posture.
 
To be sure, the ban conditions are never new to North Korea to be considered the factor behind the U-turn in Pyongyang position. That leads to the idea that the external factors, and not the internal ones, should be seen driving the North Korean leader’s shift. 
 
In the past few months, and along with Kim’s showing signs of diplomatic flexibility, some Pyongyang officials made visits to the regional countries, particularly to China and Russia, both allies of North Korea. Since November last year, two high-ranking political and military delegations from the North visited Moscow. On Tuesday, North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho made a rare visit to Russia. After talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, Yong Ho said that beside bilateral affairs the two sides discussed Pyongyang tensions’ with Seoul and Washington. A fortnight ago, Kim Jong-un unofficially and nearly secretly visited Beijing. Publicizing his visit, the media reported that he met with President Xi Jinping of China and talked with him the cases of mutual interest.
 
Diplomatic trips also took the North Korean FM to Azerbaijan and also Sweden, signaling that Pyongyang’s diplomatic moves, mediated and supported by Seoul, are serious.
 
In such conditions, naturally, some political theories put the emphasis on the work of such foreign states and allies as China and Russia, as the main drive pushing the North's leader to review his policy rather than the home factors. 
 
Looking back at the postures of the Russians and Chinese can substantiate this theory. At various times, Beijing and Moscow hoped that Pyongyang avoids further intransigence and come to the negotiating table. In a last September meeting of the UNSC to discuss additional bans on the North, Russian and Chinese envoys talked against more US-proposed restrictions on Pyongyang but at the same time called on the North to agree with talks.
 
For China and Russia, the analysts say, the favorable choice is North Korea’s conditional dialogue with the US that they hope will help realize the Moscow-Beijing camp and Pyongyang goals in the Korean Peninsula with the lowest price.
 
In its preconditions for entering discussions with the US, North Korea has repeatedly asked for its security to be guaranteed once an agreement is reached. For Pyongyang, this is achievable only through Washington’s military retreat from the Peninsula. In case of start of the negotiations, the North’s leaders will very likely ask the Americans to, in return for some Pyongyang's nuclear commitments, cut their military presence in the Peninsula and also remove their missiles, aircraft, and air defenses from South Korea and Japan, a demand very perfectly playing into the hands of the Russians and the Chinese who want the US military out of East and Southeast Asia.
 
How long will US, North Korea honeymoon go?
 
Despite the official announcement of Pyongyang authorities that they are ready to hold talks with the Americans, any serious and concrete steps towards holding the negotiations are yet to be taken. The CNN has recently reported that if nothing changes and no new developments take place, the talks between the US President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un will take place “as soon as May”, a session that will mark the leaders' first face-to-face meeting, but not the first US-North Korea negotiations.
 
The two sides signed a pact to end the nuclear dispute in 1994, dubbed “Agreed Framework.” The accord was meant to put restrictions on Pyongyang’s nuclear activities and underpin a regime for the Washington-Pyongyang relations for the next 10 years. But when President George W. Bush in summer 2001 called North Korea part of the so-called “axis of evil”, the pact practically collapsed.
 
Also in 2003, at a Chinese suggestion to put an end to the nuclear crisis, tripartite negotiations featuring the US, North Korea, and China were launched in Beijing. The outcome of several months of negotiations of the trio was an agreement on six-party dialogue body by getting other regional actors, South Korea, Russia, and Japan, on board. The six-nation dialogue stopped progress for a full year when tensions between Pyongyang and Washington escalated. They resumed in July 2005 and continued with highs and lows until 2012, the year they reached a total impasse.
 
Washington and Pyongyang's relations went to a new stage of escalation after a new round of UNSC sanctions which played as a trigger for a series of mutual threats. Things even deteriorated when Trump assumed the power at the White House. North Korea and the US kept threatening each other with missile strikes until conditional dialogue recently came to pacify the tense atmosphere.
 
The upcoming talks are, so, not the first ones and it is not unlikely to see them failing again.
 
Mentioning the Trump’s mercantilist approach to the global issues, some argue that the White House show of willingness to negotiate with North Korea is a Trump administration’s effort to de-escalate the political tensions with China and instead step up trade war against Beijing. But with regard to the US security sensitivities in the Korean Peninsula, the view of Trump’s intention to redirect the confrontation to the economic area is far from being realistic.
 
In fact, it is hard to believe that Washington compromises its security concerns and presence in Southeast Asia to the commercial war with China by simply saying yes to negotiation offer. Washington intends to curb Beijing's power gain in East Asia that could pose challenges to the US hegemony globally. Therefore, ongoing military presence in East Asia is part of a strategic plan of the US foreign policy.
 
On the other side, if North Korea rigidly holds its security preconditions, the success of the dialogue with the US will be hardly imaginable. So, Washington-Pyongyang honeymoon cannot be thought to last for a long time.
 
Still, from another perspective, Trump’s agreeing with talks to the North’s leader can be seen as an effort by the American president to credit himself with a foreign policy success, as so far he failed to make any gains diplomatically after serving over a year in office. Now via the nuclear conversations with Pyongyang, Trump’s White House can boast of a foreign policy gain.
 
So, more than the regional and international factors, what pushes Trump towards talks with Kim Jong-un is a zeal to exhibit his first term a success. For Trump, the negotiations with North Korea stand as a major win card for the next presidential election should they last until the end of his first term.