by Ronan Farrow
A month later, Trump was at the green marble rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly for the first time as president, thundering at the North Korean regime and its despot, to whom he assigned a taunting schoolyard nickname: “Rocket Man.” “No nation on Earth has an interest in seeing this band of criminals arm itself with nuclear weapons and missiles,” Trump said, narrowing his eyes. In the audience, General John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, put a palm to his face and rubbed his temples, appearing to have an existential crisis. “The United States has great strength and patience,” Trump went on. “But if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”
Kim Jong-un fired back, calling the speech “unprecedented rude nonsense” and warning: “I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire.” The word “dotard,” suggesting age and senility, dated back to the fourteenth century. It quickly became a viral sensation. (The Korean version of the text used neulg-dali-michigwang-i: “old lunatic.”) As the North Koreans continued their public offensive, Trump offered another Twitter rejoinder: “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at UN. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!”
Rex Tillerson, striking a very different tone, announced that the administration was in direct contact with the North Korean regime. “We ask, ‘Would you like to talk?’ ” he said. “We have lines of communication with Pyongyang.” Tillerson insisted that he and the president were “completely aligned” on North Korea. “The President’s policy on North Korea is a complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. And the President wants to achieve that through diplomatic efforts,” he told me. But that statement was hard to reconcile with the Tweet Trump sent shortly after Tillerson announced his diplomatic overtures to Pyongyang. “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” the President wrote. “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”
The escalation of the North Korean standoff divided America’s allies. From Germany, a weary Chancellor Angela Merkel refused to say whether her country would stand by the United States in a military confrontation with North Korea, and called, again, for negotiations. “I am against threats of this kind,” she intoned solemnly after the UN speech. “And speaking for myself and the government, I must say that we consider any type of military solution absolutely inappropriate and we are counting on diplomatic efforts. This must be vigorously implemented. In my opinion, sanctions and enforcing these sanctions are the right answer. But anything else with regard to North Korea I think is wrong. And that is why we clearly disagree with the US president.”
Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, rattled in the wake of missile launches over his country, hewed closer to Trump, laying out a history of diplomatic failures with North Korea. “Again and again, attempts to resolve issues through dialogue have all come to naught,” he said. “In what hope of success are we now repeating the very same failure a third time?”
BOTH WERE RIGHT. Diplomacy of one kind had failed in North Korea. But diplomacy of a different kind was also, in the eyes of those most intimately familiar with the decades of engagement Abe was referring to, the only way out of the world’s most dangerous standoff.
Both the Clinton and second Bush administrations had made considerable diplomatic inroads with the Hermit Kingdom. In 1994, the United States actually succeeded in brokering a denuclearization agreement in which Pyongyang agreed to freeze and dismantle its entire program. North Korea cheated, purchasing equipment for highly enriched uranium development. But some veterans of North Korea diplomacy maintain that the United States sealed the doom of the agreement by failing to live up to its own commitments. Pledges to build light-water reactors and provide fuel to Pyongyang were both sabotaged amidst political fights between the Clinton administration and a Republican Congress. Bush sealed the demise of the agreement when he took office, walking away altogether. Over the course of his first term, the administration adopted a more bellicose stance, listing the North Korean regime as one it might have to use nuclear weapons against and returning to saber-rattling condemnations.
In George W. Bush’s second term, however, Condoleezza Rice tried anew. She sent a career diplomat named Christopher Hill, who had been part of the negotiating team that brokered peace in the Balkans under Richard Holbrooke, to lead six-party talks on denuclearizing North Korea. “This administration has fought two wars,” Rice told Hill wearily. “And now we are looking for a few diplomats.” Hill and a team of tireless Foreign Service officers—including Yuri Kim, who, a decade later, became embroiled in Trump’s Mahogany Row massacre—threw themselves into the challenge for years. They endured weeks away from their families, long hours on flights across the world, and twelve- to thirteen-hour negotiation marathons in Beijing. The North Koreans were among the thorniest opponents in the world. Even in the Balkans, there had been moments of personal ice-breaking—discussions of children and grandchildren, sports and hobbies. The North Koreans had a “robotlike” reputation, according to Hill. After years of tense late nights together, he felt he barely knew them.
Throughout the ups and downs, Hill tried to carry forward the lessons of diplomats past, including his boss in the Balkans. When the Chinese didn’t show for a promised meeting and proceeding without them meant going rogue and defying his marching orders, his first thought was, “would Holbrooke have canceled the meeting?” and he persevered. Later, at a low point in the negotiations, Holbrooke himself showed up to rally Hill’s team. They were a part of history, he told them, as he later told me in Afghanistan. They should enjoy the moment. “You may never have another like it.”
It was through those years of high-wire diplomacy that Chris Hill found himself, in the fall of 2007, standing in a white gown and hood, surveying an aging plutonium plant about two hours north of Pyongyang. Sections of the facility’s thick pipes were being sawed to pieces. American and international “disablers” were on hand to supervise. Seven months later, North Korea would blow up the plant’s cooling tower. It was historic: the first time North Korea had deactivated a reactor since 2001.
In the end, it wasn’t enough. Pyongyang submitted a visibly incomplete accounting of its nuclear activities, then grew cold at demands for more. But talks had left behind a considerable legacy to build upon. Rifts had been closed in a rocky relationship with South Korea. And cooperation had been established, to a degree once thought impossible, with China—the single most important player in any resolution of the North Korean crisis to this day.
And so it was a surprise, for many of the career diplomats involved, when the Obama administration repeated the same mistake the Bush administration made in its first term and walked away from those years of diplomatic inroads entirely. “Frankly, I think what really happened was the Obama administration looked at the heat everyone got for trying to do something with North Korea, whether it was the Clinton administration or the second Bush term,” Hill reflected. “The Obama Administration just decided, ‘We have other priorities and this thing will wither on the vine.’ They never got serious.” I asked Hillary Clinton whether she regretted that turn away from North Korea. “No, we—” she stammered, “Chris Hill was continuing his negotiations when we were there.” When I told her Hill felt the effort was sidelined, she said, “I can’t speak to that. I don’t know that. I’m not going to agree or disagree with him.” I’d never heard her sound so tired. “Maybe he didn’t feel there was [support] from the White House or Pentagon,” she went on. “But we certainly tried to get things going at the State Department as best we could.”
HILL, AND THE OTHER DIPLOMATS who presided over the effort, remain in agreement about one thing: diplomacy is still the only way forward. “If we get out of the North Korean situation, it’s probably going to be because of diplomacy,” Condoleezza Rice said. In Hill’s view, th
at might not mean more talks with North Korea—at least not right away—but it had to mean intensive talks with China. “If you can’t get serious about working directly with the North Koreans, which I totally understand,” he pled as Donald Trump ramped up his rhetoric at the UN, “then at least get serious with China. . .that’s where I think we need to have a lot more serious diplomacy—and by that I mean we can’t just be sending them messages in the night via Twitter accounts, we need to really sit down and have a no-kidding discussion about our mutual interests.” The Chinese agreed. By 2017 they were making public calls for six-party talks. It was a way to appear responsible without committing to the cutting of ties with North Korea it had long resisted—just the kind of stance on which a team of skilled American diplomats might move the needle.
Brian Hook, the policy planning director, said that behind closed doors, Tillerson had, “through sheer diplomatic persistence,” pressed China into a tougher stance on North Korea. “It began when he sat down with Chinese officials during his visit to Beijing and said, ‘You can do this the easy way or the hard way, but you guys have to play a much greater role in denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula,’ ” he told me.
Whether those efforts could have prevailed would remain a question mark: Trump forced Tillerson out before they could bear fruit. Instead, Trump astonished allies when, in a meeting with a South Korean delegation, he agreed on the spot to personally meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. This was announced, almost casually, by the South Koreans after the meeting. Rex Tillerson, who had just hours earlier said the United States was still “a long way from negotiations,” told the press that the president hadn’t spoken to him beforehand, surprising no one. But as far as anyone could tell, Trump hadn’t told any other officials either.
White House and State Department personnel scrambled to adjust course. The agreement was a curveball. Some hoped it would thaw relations. But many in the foreign policy establishment feared the move, undertaken out of the blue and absent broader diplomatic context, would be taken by North Korea as recognition of its status as a nuclear power. And officials worried that Trump, mercurial to begin with, would have little by way of a diplomatic team behind him to guide any talks. It was hard to see the United States’ capacity for diplomacy in the region as anything but downsized. At the State Department, the sizable North Korea unit led by Yuri Kim a decade earlier no longer existed. A year into Trump’s tenure, there wasn’t even a permanent assistant secretary for East Asia.
THE REST OF THE WORLD has not stood by as America relinquishes its leadership in diplomacy and development. The balance of global diplomatic power is shifting. During Tillerson’s first trip to China as secretary of state, he and President Xi Jinping sat in matching taupe leather armchairs in front of a mural of Chinese pastoral beauty: cranes soaring over pristine valleys and forests. They wore matching red ties and dark jackets. And, in a move that left close followers of US-Chinese relations agape, they used matching language. President Xi urged the United States to “expand cooperative areas and achieve win-win results.” Tillerson agreed: “The US side is ready to develop relations with China based on the principle of no conflict, no confrontation, mutual respect, and win-win cooperation.”
A lay observer might have blinked and missed it, but Asia experts at the State Department and beyond saw something unusual immediately. Tillerson had all but copy-pasted earlier statements by Xi who, just a few months before, had expressed hope that President Trump would “uphold the principles of non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect, and win-win cooperation.” That was the most recent of many examples of Xi, and other communist officials, using that coded sequence of terms to describe a new balance of powers, with China as an equal to the United States, and the US deferring to Chinese prerogatives on contentious issues from Taiwan to territorial disputes in the South China Sea. State-run media instantly picked up on the dog whistle. “Tillerson has implicitly endorsed the new model of major power relations,” crowed the communist-affiliated Global Times, saying Tillerson’s language had given “US allies in the Asia Pacific region an impression that China and the US are equal. . .” as “Barack Obama refused to do.”
Several officials at the State Department told me the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, home to regional experts attuned to the significance of such language, had not been consulted on the statement. Instead, it had been drafted by the White House—according to several sources there, by the office of Jared Kushner. Brian Hook, the director of policy planning, did not dispute this account of events, but said that an acting official from the Asia bureau was on the trip. Was the acting official involved in drafting the statements, I asked?
“I don’t recall,” Hook said. “You’ve been on these trips. You know. They’re a blur.”
“Did Tillerson intend to mirror their language?” I asked.
“He is not intending to mirror their language.”
“But is he aware that’s what he did?”
“He—he signs off on every statement he delivers. He believes in win-win. He believes that China and the US can work together.” Later, Hook added that Tillerson “assigns different meanings than the Chinese do to stock formulations. For example, the secretary believes in win-win, but that doesn’t mean two wins for China.” Hook described Tillerson’s approach to China as “results-based,” with a willingness to “count[er] any Chinese actions that harm our interests.” But in the eyes of some career diplomats, those goals were being undermined by the steadfast refusal to draw on expertise within the system. An official in the Asia bureau said watching that trip unfold, with no contact between Tillerson and the experts back home that would typically be consulted on such statements, was like being locked outside watching an enthusiastic dog tear up your upholstery.
As America’s diplomats face budget cuts, China’s coffers are more flush with each passing year. Beijing has poured money into development projects, including a $1.4-trillion slate of infrastructure initiatives around the world that would dwarf the Marshall Plan, adjusted for inflation. Its spending on foreign assistance is still a fraction of the United States’, but the trend line is striking, with funding growing by an average of more than 20 percent annually since 2005. The rising superpower is making sure the world knows it. In one recent year, the US State Department spent $666 million on public diplomacy, aimed at winning hearts and minds abroad. While it’s difficult to know exactly what China spends on equivalent programs, one analysis put the value of its “external propaganda” programs at about $10 billion a year.
In international organizations, Beijing looms large behind a retreating Washington, DC. As the US proposes cuts to its UN spending, China has become the second-largest funder of UN peacekeeping missions. It now has more peacekeepers in conflicts around the world than the four other permanent Security Council members combined. The move is pragmatic: Beijing gets more influence, and plum appointments in the United Nations’ governing bodies.
Around the world, the same transformation is playing out. The caricature of China’s foreign policy offered by Western powers—ruthless economic expansion, unmoored from either ethical compunction or willingness to engage diplomatically—was accurate for years. Now, in Afghanistan, China is exploring a mediating role in that country’s complex relationship with neighboring Pakistan. In Sudan, China for decades maintained a policy of “non-interference,” buying oil from the notorious National Islamic Front/National Congress Party in Khartoum as that regime massacred civilians in Darfur and South Sudan. Sudan’s brutalized population pleaded in vain for China to use its unique leverage to demand peace. Now, China’s Africa envoy shuttles around the region, offering to facilitate mediations and trying to craft a settlement to the violence that still engulfs South Sudan. Beijing called the hands-on approach a “new chapter” in its foreign policy.
The impact is starker in Asia. As the Trump administration abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a regional trade agreement that the Obama a
dministration had led and nurtured since 2009, China swiftly stepped in with its own massive trade pact. And in countries around the region, the difference is being felt on the ground. The Trump administration proposed cutting assistance to Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan entirely. These were small programs, but they were the only visible manifestation of American influence in countries strategically located adjacent to both the war in Afghanistan and the United States’ showdown with Russia. They’re also home to brand new train lines delivered under China’s sweeping “One Belt, One Road” initiative.
“It’s a completely self-inflicted wound,” John Kerry said of China’s encroachment on the kind of diplomacy and development the United States once dominated. “It worries me a lot more than many of the other issues consuming the public debate most days. . .in terms of a big, powerful, ambitious country setting the agenda and executing on it—they’re eating our lunch today, and this president has invited it because he thinks our retreat is some kind of accomplishment.” China is no global hero. It would be an oversimplification to argue that these first forays into diplomatic leadership can fully counter the United States’ deeply rooted legacy of engagement. And Beijing brings to the table a very different kind of leadership: still ruthless, still burdened by its refusal to confront its own human rights abuses. But the trajectory is meaningful. Already, for the child born in Kazakhstan today, one world power’s leadership will be evident, and the other’s will not. Already, from Sudan to Pakistan, I have spoken to young people who grew up with more visible and aggressively branded Chinese infrastructure. If China can mature as a diplomatic power as rapidly as it has as a force for economic development, America will have ceded one of the most important ways in which great powers shape the world.