Trump and Kim’s Cozy Relationship Makes Nuclear Talks Tougher

Since the breakup of the most recent round of talks in Hanoi in February, however, Kim has registered his displeasure not as a lover scorned, but as a dictator at the helm of an increasingly advanced nuclear arsenal. Over one week in May, he personally oversaw the trials of at least two short-range ballistic missiles capable of striking all of South Korea, where some 28,500 U.S. troops are based.

The back-to-back launches broke an almost 17-month pause in major weapons testing and likely violated United Nations resolutions banning North Korea from firing ballistic missiles—but crucially, it didn’t violate Kim’s pledge to Trump to halt testing of long-range missiles that could strike the continental U.S. The act was both aggressive and subtle, showing the U.S. that North Korea was willing to play ball but refused to be played.

In securing the unprecedented meeting with Trump and entering direct negotiations with the U.S. president, Kim left himself few options if the conversations were to go poorly. The U.S. has been in a similar position since Trump tweeted just after the Singapore meeting that North Korea was “no longer a nuclear threat.” Both leaders must now walk a delicate line to save face and avoid what neither of them wants: nuclear war.

Kim’s primary goal going into the Hanoi summit was considerably more mundane. He was seeking to make North Korea a normal country in the eyes of the world and to remove sanctions that are crushing the economy and stoking popular unrest. According to the UN, its 2018 harvest was the worst in a decade, leaving 40 percent of the population in need of food assistance.

Some analysts viewed the short-range missile launches as an attempt to draw the U.S. into a third round of negotiations. Weeks earlier, in a speech before the North Korean parliament, Kim gave Trump a soft ultimatum. “My personal relationship with President Trump is not as hostile as the relations between the two countries,” he said, adding that as long as the U.S. has “the right stance,” North Korea is willing to give negotiations another try. “In any case, we will wait with patience for the U.S. to make a courageous decision by the end of this year.”

The end of this year is, of course, the start of 2020, an election year for Trump. The provocations by Kim have given Democratic challengers an opening to renew attacks on Trump’s cozy relationship with a dictator accused of murdering his brother with a nerve agent and allowing the mistreatment of detained American student Otto Warmbier.

“Kim Jong Un knows Trump’s weakness,” says Chun Yung-woo, a negotiator in the failed six-party nuclear talks convened in the early 2000s and national security adviser to former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak. “Trump claims that it is his achievement that North Korea stopped testing missiles and nuclear weapons. Showing Kim can resume the tests is the scariest card Kim can play.”

Trump repeated these claims in a taped interview with Fox News that aired on May 19. “I’m not somebody that wants to go in to war, because war hurts economies. War kills people most importantly—by far most importantly,” Trump said, defending his record of avoiding international conflict as his administration has taken a more aggressive military stance against Iran and its pursuit of nuclear weapons. “I think that if you look, when I went to North Korea there were nuclear tests all the time, there were missiles going up all the time, we had a very tough time. Then we got along. We’ll see what happens right now.”

Current South Korean President Moon Jae-in is caught between the two leaders. Seoul is within the range of both missiles fired in early May, and Moon doesn’t want to disrupt his own fragile relationship with Kim by appearing to side with Trump. In his speech, Kim urged Moon to stop being an “officious mediator,” using a Korean slang term—ojirap—that’s rarely used by public figures in official settings and almost never by a younger person referring to an elder. The South Korean government “must defend the interest of the nation,” Kim said.

Moon helped broker the first summit between Trump and Kim, in a pair of dramatic meetings with the North Korean leader on the Koreas’ militarized border, and is now pushing for a third by appealing to common human decency. “Trump sent his blessing to the humanitarian assistance to North Korea,” Moon told Korean Broadcasting System on May 9, referring to food aid South Korea will fund via the World Food Programme, adding that he hoped the assistance would help break the stalemate in denuclearization talks. Working-level discussions have hardly progressed since Kim signed a vague pledge to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” last June. On May 8 the U.S. even halted efforts to recover the remains of American war dead from North Korea, one of the few concrete outcomes from the first meeting.

The second missile test, on May 9, occurred while Trump’s top nuclear envoy, Stephen Biegun, was in Seoul to meet with South Korean officials. There’s been no indication that the U.S. is willing to accept what many North Korea watchers agree is Kim’s true goal: admission into the exclusive club of accepted nuclear-armed states. Conceding could send a message to states like Iran that defying the U.S. and acquiring nuclear weapons is the best way to ensure your regime’s survival.

Trump, who once mocked Kim as “Little Rocket Man,” has so far sought to keep the missile tests from damaging their relationship. “Nobody’s happy about it,” Trump told reporters, dismissing the weapons as “smaller missiles, short-range missiles” without criticizing the launch.

The more time passes, the more sophisticated Kim’s arsenal becomes, shrinking Trump’s margin of error in responding to threats and increasing the danger of miscalculation. There’s also the risk that Trump and Kim learn they’re not as close as they thought they were. “The thing that I have always worried about is how personal the diplomacy is,” says Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “You have these individual leaders making decisions that are toggling between the abstract and the geopolitical and the deeply personal,” he says. “They are all mixed together, and that scares the heck out of me.” —With Jon Herskovitz

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