Battlegrounds
Page 40
By the time of the San Francisco meeting, I had already spoken with the president about the best time for me to transition to my successor. Yachi was aware of my departure, as the White House chief of staff’s office had already leaked rumors of it to the press. After our meeting, I sat with my friend in front of the large fireplace in the Marines’ Memorial Club library. When he expressed his and Prime Minister Abe’s hope that I would continue serving, I answered obliquely and told him how much I appreciated the opportunity to serve with him. I knew that there was no guarantee that maximum pressure would achieve denuclearization, but I would finish my tour of duty as national security advisor hoping that the strategy would survive and that we would not succumb to the tendency of returning to the failed pattern of past efforts.
* * *
TWO YEARS after my last meeting with Yachi and Chung, the threat from North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs continued to grow despite President Trump’s best effort to achieve a breakthrough. Although the first Trump-Kim Summit, in Singapore, ended on a positive note, with an ambiguous DPRK commitment to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, the course of events that followed revealed that Kim’s and Trump’s definitions of denuclearization were incompatible. In the summer of 2018, perhaps as a gesture of good faith, President Trump even gave Kim something for nothing, postponing what he described in a tweet as “ridiculous and expensive” joint U.S.–South Korean military exercises.27 But Kim may have interpreted Trump’s gesture and other conciliatory actions and words—such as Trump’s overruling new Treasury Department sanctions on North Korea, or stating that he no longer wanted to use the term maximum pressure because “we’re getting along,” or stating that he did not want to impose more sanctions because of his relationship with Kim Jong-un—as an indication that Trump was returning to previous ineffective tactics like a freeze for freeze and premature alleviation of sanctions.28 In early 2019, President Trump reminded North Korea that there was a much better future awaiting should Kim denuclearize. A presidential tweet predicted that the hermit kingdom could become a “great Economic Powerhouse.” While the investment and real estate boom that would follow North Korea’s opening sounded good from a Western perspective, to Kim the prospect of opening North Korea to the world could mean the beginning of the end of his family dynasty. In the same tweet, Trump praised Kim as a “capable leader.”29
President Trump was trying to separate his relationship with Kim from the negotiations. At a rally in West Virginia soon after the Singapore Summit, Trump summarized their first meeting. He told his enthusiastic supporters that “I was really being tough, and so was he. And we would go back and forth. And then we fell in love. No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters.”30 President Trump even excused Kim for personal responsibility in Otto Warmbier’s death, stating that he would “take him at his word” that Kim knew nothing of the abuse and fatal injuries inflicted on the college student in his prison.31 Such excuses and professions of affection seemed to render Kim reluctant to criticize Trump personally, but they were insufficient to achieve a breakthrough with the North Korean leader.
North Korea was adept at cultivating hope. In May 2018, to clear the way for the Singapore summit, Kim released three American hostages, Tony Kim, Kim Hak-song, and Kim Dong-chul, to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. After the June 2018 summit, Kim dropped his most incendiary rhetoric, as did the DPRK’s state-controlled media. Meanwhile, Kim and Moon continued their inter-Korean dialogue. In September 2018, Moon and his wife, Kim Jung-sook, visited Pyongyang for three days, signing a “Pyongyang Joint Declaration” promising civilian exchanges, economic cooperation, family reunions, and the destruction of two missile facilities. During that historic visit, Moon gave a powerful speech in which he reported that he and the Great Successor had “agreed on concrete measures to completely eliminate the fear of war and the risk of armed conflicts on the Korean Peninsula” and instead “turn our beautiful territory from Baekdu Mountain to Halla Mountain into a land of permanent peace, free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threats, and to bequeath it to our future generations.”32 Moon, like Trump, promised prosperity as he shared a vision of “three Economic Belts” to connect the Koreas to each other and to their neighbors. He tried to create additional momentum and goodwill by removing land mines from the DMZ and excluding military aircraft from portions of the border region. He did his best to really, this time, jump-start the gradual transformation of the regime and erode its hostility. Sadly, as in the past, Moon, like Trump, was unable to achieve a breakthrough.
As noted earlier, strategic narcissism works both ways. The second Trump-Kim Summit, in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February 2019, exposed misunderstandings on both sides. One of Kim’s officials had watched the TV dramas The West Wing and Madam Secretary to understand how U.S. administrations made policy decisions.33 Kim Jong-un, perhaps advised poorly by Chinese officials as well as his television-watching aides, seemed to believe that President Trump was so eager for a foreign policy “win” in advance of the 2020 presidential election and so weakened by the Republican Party’s defeat in the 2018 midterm elections and the ongoing Mueller investigation that he would grant sanctions relief in exchange for the symbolic destruction of a used-up nuclear facility at Yongbyon.34 And President Trump, perhaps too confident in his own persuasive abilities and the irresistibility of economic incentives, may have overestimated Kim’s ability to abandon the regime’s Juche ideology, the ideas promulgated by Kim Il-sung that assert the self-reliance of the North Korean people, the primacy of their interests, and their purity. Juche celebrates deprivation as a sign of the North Korean people’s virtues and superiority. President Trump may have also underestimated the dictator’s willingness to discard the opportunity to improve the lives of North Koreans.
After the failure of the Hanoi summit, some argued that Trump had missed his shot at a deal with the DPRK because he refused to make concessions to Kim. But to have done so would have replicated the pattern of the 1994 Agreed Framework, during which sanctions were eased in exchange for the suspension of missile tests and energy assistance was promised in exchange for halting activities at Yongbyon. Remaining true to the principle of not lifting sanctions prematurely or rewarding the DPRK merely for talking kept alive the possibility of convincing Kim, maybe, at some point in the future, that he was safer without nuclear weapons than with them.
In 2019, the United States and South Korea both tried to keep the door open to the North, but Kim kept pushing it closed. President Trump continued to emphasize his positive personal relationship with Chairman Kim and even did a last-minute pop-in to the DMZ to meet Kim after a visit to the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, in June. Meanwhile, the regime picked up its aggressive rhetoric, calling National Security Advisor John Bolton a “human defect” and lashing out at Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for “fabricating stories like a fiction writer.”35 President Moon continued to offer humanitarian aid and cooperative efforts, such as joint quarantine of pigs to protect against swine fever. At the end of 2019, Kim Jong-un hosted the Fifth Plenary Meeting of the Seventh Central Committee. He seemed to reject flatly the vision of a prosperous, denuclearized North Korea, stating that “we further hardened our resolution never to barter the security and dignity of the state and the safety of its future for anything else.”36 It appeared that President Trump’s love had gone unrequited as Kim described the Trump administration’s engagement with him as “double-dealing behavior of the brigandish state in trying to completely strangle and stifle the DPRK through its provocative political, military and economic maneuvers.” He threatened to “shift to a shocking action to pay back for the pains that our people had to suffer.” In other words, back to the old cycle. And in contrast to his 2019 New Year’s address, in which he referred to the economy thirty-nine times and predicted that 2019 would be “full of hope,” while extending greetings to the “compatriots in the south and abroad who shared our will in writing a new history of reconciliation, unity, peace and prosperity,”3
7 Kim seemed in 2020 to predict more deprivation as “the DPRK-U.S. standoff has now finally been compressed to that between self-reliance and sanctions.” Still, in January 2020, President Trump sent Kim a warm birthday letter.38 Kim avoided insulting Trump personally, but his spokesperson accused the United States of deceiving North Korea over the past eighteen months of negotiations.
Meanwhile, North Korea showed no signs of slowing its nuclear or missile programs. Soon after the Hanoi summit, it tested a “tactical guided weapon” of an unknown quality and fired several short-range missiles into the Sea of Japan.39 In 2019, North Korea fired twenty-six missiles, the most violations of UN resolutions by the DPRK in a single year. However, Kim refrained from long-range missile tests or another nuclear test. But as prospects for improved relations faded, defensive mechanisms kicked in. Kim dismissed the humanist Moon as “officious” and “double-dealing” and did his best to dash hopes of opening to the South by stating that the South Koreans should “mind their own business.”40 After the novelty of their initial affections wore off, Kim may have felt stuck in his relationship with President Trump, and doubted whether the professions of love and promises of security for his regime were true.
President Moon’s and President Trump’s bold diplomatic foray might have been the beginning of a brighter and better future for the people of North Korea while removing a grave threat to the world. Having borne witness to a dramatic shift in a geopolitical landscape that many did not think possible in October 1989 along the East-West German border, I had permitted myself to at least hope. But Kim could not yet transcend his deep resentment of the South’s success nor his reluctance to open up to the world lest his people’s access to the truth expose Juche ideology as a fraud and reveal the Kim dynasty as neither superior nor virtuous.
* * *
IN 2020, as Kim Jong-un entered his ninth year as dictator and Donald Trump prepared to run for reelection, the strategy of maximum pressure was still intact but had not yet been achieved. Sanctions have been imperfectly enforced, with both China and Russia calling for sanctions relief. Both countries have also tried to renege on commitments to return North Korean “guest workers,” the estimated one hundred thousand North Korean citizens who work in Russia and China under conditions that border on slavery. Reports of Chinese evasion of sanctions increased, including evidence that China was providing components critical to North Korea’s production of transporter erector launchers (TELs) for its missiles, while ship-to-ship transfers of fuel imports as well as illicit coal exports grew.41 After it was clear that there would be no sudden breakthrough on denuclearization, it was time to increase pressure, including tougher sanctions enforcement, the exposure of human rights violations, cyber actions, and information operations.
The United States and its allies should penalize those nations that are failing to enforce sanctions and take a range of actions to improve enforcement. Secondary sanctions on financial institutions that facilitate illicit commerce with North Korea—as is alleged in the case of two of China’s largest banks—could be particularly effective. Thirty representatives of North Korean banks are stationed overseas in China, Russia, Libya, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates to help evade sanctions. North Korea also uses diplomatic privileges and property to generate more of the hard currency it needs for its weapons programs. A sustained campaign of fines, sanctions, and law enforcement actions could collapse North Korea’s evasion of sanctions. Cyber interdiction should complement these efforts; as should offensive cyber actions against DPRK state-sponsored cyber criminals, many of whom operate outside the DPRK. For example, defectors have testified that teams of North Korean hackers receive training and carry out cyber attacks in Shenyang, China.42 UN sanctions on North Korean overseas laborers should be enforced. The United States and like-minded countries should sanction countries and commercial entities that help the Kim regime evade sanctions and continue its nuclear weapons program through a form of slave labor.
Diplomatic efforts should focus on getting other nations not only to enforce sanctions, but also to go beyond those sanctions and do their part to impose greater cost on Pyongyang for continuing its nuclear and missile programs. For example, the U.S. State Department and its diplomats abroad have been effective in encouraging others to take action against North Korea’s extensive organized crime network.43 Those efforts should be intensified and adapted continuously as North Korea finds new ways to evade sanctions and engages in novel illicit activities such as cybercrime.
Some argue that sanctions have not been effective, but sanctions against North Korea have never been fully enforced. North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are dependent on sanctions erosion, as none of the major components are manufactured in North Korea. Sanctions authorized in 2017, if enforced, would generate unprecedented pressure on the North. For example, forcing the return of North Korean guest workers from China and Russia would constrain further the regime’s access to hard currency and force tradeoffs between spending on its nuclear and missile programs and spending to improve the lives of North Koreans.
After promising an improved economy in his 2019 New Year’s speech, Kim returned to prioritization of military capabilities over quality of life, telling his people in 2020 that “it is our firm revolutionary faith to defend the country’s dignity and defeat imperialism through self-prosperity even though we tighten our belts.”44 After a period of rising expectations, not only the North’s vast peasant class, but also the privileged class in Pyongyang may begin to question the wisdom and effectiveness of the Great Successor. It seems likely that the severe restriction in trade associated with the coronavirus in early 2020 was bound to not only restrict the economy, but prove to be an unintended and unfortunate means of enforcing sanctions on North Korea.
U.S. diplomats should also work with other nations and international organizations to expose and sanction North Korea’s human rights abuses, including its abuse of overseas laborers. A UN special Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK concluded in 2014 that “the gravity, scale, and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”45 In the ensuing years, the regime’s brutality has been undiminished. Some may argue that pressuring Pyongyang on human rights will diminish the likelihood of negotiations. But any negotiations, as seen during the Hanoi summit, are premature if Kim has not yet concluded that he could be better off without nuclear weapons.
U.S., South Korean, and Japanese militaries and the militaries of other nations play an important role in this pressure campaign. We should seek legal justification based on “reasonable grounds” to interdict and search North Korea–linked vessels, impound contraband, and sanction the offending ships and shipping companies. Military exercises and preparation for a swift and overwhelming response to North Korean aggression are also critical to convincing Kim that the United States and its allies possess the capability and, if faced with a potential nuclear strike, the will to impose denuclearization militarily without his cooperation. The success of coercive diplomacy in the form of maximum pressure depends in part on Kim’s belief that the United States and its allies are more motivated to achieve denuclearization than he is to hold on to nuclear weapons and missiles.46
Interlocutors with the Kim regime and its enablers should continue to emphasize that the removal of the Kim regime is not a goal of U.S. policy. But they might also communicate that the goal could change if Kim refuses to denuclearize and if leaders conclude that the risk of a nuclear-armed North Korea is greater than the risk of collapsing the regime. Of course, all must acknowledge that aggressive action against the North could precipitate an escalation to a costly war. Terms like limited strike are misleading because North Korea would have a say in what happened after such a strike. That is why it is worth the effort to test the thesis that the combination of maximum pressure, security guarantees, and the prospect of a prosperous North Korea can achieve denuclearization. Still, it is prudent for U.S. leaders to dis
cuss with allies, especially South Korea and Japan, scenarios that might lead them to conclude that the only way to remove an unacceptable threat of nuclear blackmail or a catastrophic attack is to act militantly against the Kim regime and its forces.
Some will argue that even such a discussion would encourage Kim to keep his nuclear weapons at all cost for deterrence. Quite possibly, Kim views the example of Libya—in particular, Muammar Gaddafi’s decision to dismantle his program only to be overthrown and brutally murdered just one month before Kim took over from his deceased father—as a reason to hold on to nuclear weapons. But Gaddafi was overthrown by an internal uprising that was enabled by a NATO air campaign. If his own people or those around him conclude that Kim’s policies are failing, he should be much more worried about internal than external threats.
Due to the nature of the Kim regime and its developing nuclear capability, how can the United States, South Korea, Japan, or any of the DPRK’s neighbors be sure that a North Korean TEL rolling out of a tunnel and carrying a missile is on its way to a test rather than to an actual attack? And how could any of those nations know if the warhead it is carrying is inert, high explosive, chemical, or nuclear? The United States, South Korea, and Japan should expand surveillance and missile defense as well as land-, sea-, and air-based strike capabilities to deter and, if necessary, preempt a DPRK attack.
Diplomats should focus as much on allies as on North Korea and its enablers. Because of the grave danger to their people, South Korean and Japanese leaders must be full-time partners in developing ways to overcome the North Korea challenge. The relationship between the two U.S. allies deteriorated in 2019 over the South Korean Supreme Court’s verdict that the victims of forced labor during Japanese occupation deserved rights to reparations from Japanese firms. In response, Japan imposed trade restrictions on a number of Japan-made industrial products, such as chemicals and precision machine tools, that are deemed essential to South Korea’s high-tech firms.47 Seoul then nearly canceled the awkwardly named intelligence sharing agreement between the two countries, the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA). Many South Koreans began calling for boycotts of Japan, a move that resulted in canceled travel plans and a refusal to patronize Japanese-owned businesses or purchase Japanese products. The rift was a gift to Beijing, allowing China to pose as a mediator. Xi hosted Moon and Abe in Beijing in December 2019. China used this and subsequent trilateral meetings between Moon, Abe, and Premier Li Keqiang to depict China as the most influential power broker in the region.