Politics and Money

[PegnVA]

ANYONE COULD HAVE SEEN TRUMP'S FAILURE IN HANOI COMING. EXCEPT TRUMP.
U.S. officials are deluding themselves if they think Kim Jong Un will disarm before sanctions end.
By Jeffrey Lewis
Jeffrey Lewis is a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
February 28 at 6:10 PM

As President Trump flew to Hanoi this week, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders had a surprise announcement: Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un would meet earlier than expected, at a dinner on the first evening. The late announcement led skeptics to describe the dinner as an attempt to overshadow Michael Cohen’s embarrassing testimony about his work for Trump. But the last-minute dinner also raised unexpected challenges. The two sides apparently struggled over the menu, with the White House pressing for simpler fare.

Even as a first-time novelist, I know this is called “foreshadowing.”

The dinner went well enough, according to reports, but during the meeting the next day, everything collapsed. Trump and Kim departed early, leaving behind a carefully prepared lunch of foie gras, snowfish and candied ginseng. Members of the U.S. delegation were seen grabbing burgers.

Trump and North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho both gave news conferences after the talks broke down. While they characterized the cause of the collapse in different terms, the basic outlines are clear enough. Everyone seems to agree that North Korea offered to close its nuclear facilities at a place called Yongbyon. Yongbyon is not North Korea’s only source of fissile material for nuclear weapons, but it is an important site. In exchange, North Korea demanded what it described as “partial” relief from sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council. Trump objected, insisting that Kim would have to close other sites involved in the production of nuclear weapons before any sanctions could be lifted.

This outcome comes as a surprise. North Korean officials have been clear for months that they were willing to close Yongbyon in exchange for “corresponding measures” and — working with China and Russia — North Korea has been making it clear that those corresponding measures included sanctions relief. For months, it has been clear that North Korea was offering to close the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon and only those facilities. Other facilities, including a uranium enrichment plant near Kangson that my colleagues and I helped identify, were never on the table.

So why did U.S. officials think they were? For some months, others and I have been concerned about the degree to which South Korean and U.S. officials have been misrepresenting public statements by Kim. Those misrepresentations naturally raised questions about whether the administration’s characterization of Kim’s private comments was accurate and, if not, whether those officials were fooling us — or themselves.

For example, in a recent speech at Stanford University, the Trump administration’s special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, flatly asserted that North Korea had privately offered to close much more than just Yongbyon. His reasoning was strange: He explained that he believed North Korea was offering to close facilities beyond Yongbyon because “in describing to us their commitment to dismantle and destroy their plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities, the North Koreans have also added the critical words ‘and more.’ ” At the time, this seemed to be an absurdly specific reading of a vague phrase. “And more” might mean so many things, or even nothing at all. But Biegun was apparently willing to fly Trump halfway around the world to Hanoi based on the idea that it represented a commitment to declare other secret facilities and abandon them.

Hanoi confirms what we might have imagined all along. Biegun was wrong. When the United States tried to press North Korea on this imaginary commitment to close “more” locations, the North Korean position remained the same as it has been since the fall: Sanctions relief in exchange for the shutdown on the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon and no more.

So Trump walked away. Trump himself sounded a hopeful note in his news conference, expressing his belief that “eventually we’ll get there.” Ri, the North Korean foreign minister, was far dourer, stating that North Korea’s position would “never be changed” even if the United States proposed more negotiations. One of his deputies was more scathing. “Chairman Kim got the feeling that he didn’t understand the way Americans calculate,” Choe Son Hui told reporters. “I have a feeling that Chairman Kim may have lost the will” to continue negotiations.

What really happened in Hanoi was that Trump and Kim finally confronted the fundamental difference in their expectations, a difference many people who have studied the nuclear situation on the Korean Peninsula have warned about from the start.
-washingtonpost.com
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/28/anyone-could-have-seen-trumps-failure-hanoi-coming-except-trump/?utm_term=.4ebdcbc2a3be