THE SINGAPORE TRYST
It certainly appears that the summit meeting between President Trump and North Korea’s (the DPRK) Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un is back on schedule. The two are supposed to meet on June12th. This promises to be one of the most bizarre meetings in diplomatic history. The President, who is famous for doing almost no traditional preparation (he doesn’t like to read things), is forced to rely on “going with his gut”. He began this episode by spontaneously deciding (against the advice of almost everybody in his administration), to have this face to face meeting with the youthful, the inscrutable, and to his rivals, the very deadly Kim Jong-un.
The meeting is to be held in Singapore. There were good reasons for holding it there. Singapore (lion city), is an independent island city-state off the south coast of Malaysia and just north of Indonesia. It is one of the most crowded, most regulated, most law abiding populations on Earth (neither leader will have to worried about demonstrations; any crowd larger than five requires a government permit). A very ethnically mixed population of 5.5 million live in a space half the size of Michigan’s Macomb County just north of Detroit (Macomb has a very suburban population of roughly 871,000.). Thanks to a kind of benevolent elected dictatorship of the late Lee Kuan Yew (his oldest son is now prime minister), the tiny island state has become a wealthy technically advanced economic hub. One in every six households has a net worth of a million dollars or more, not including property, businesses or luxury goods. We can reasonably assume that the real reason for holding the meeting there is its unusual ability to guarantee the participants’ safety.
This is hardly the first attempt by a President of the United States to deal with North Korea. Bill Clinton made a herculean effort to reduce the threat of North Korean atomic weapons. In 1994, the North Koreans signed the Agreed Framework, in which they agreed to disable their then current reactors in exchange for safer light water reactors which would be provided for them. They would receive 500,000 tons of heavy oil a year until the new reactors were in place. The Koreans seemed to be living up to the agreement. In the fall elections in 1994, the Republicans gained a majority in the Congress. Eager to defeat any effort by Clinton (sound familiar?) and, arguing that the Framework was too favorable to the North Koreans, the Republicans refused to provide funding. George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union did not help by referring to the North Koreans as part of the Axis of Evil. The North Koreans, paranoid at best, thought they were being set up and disavowed the agreement. There was plenty of blame to go around on both sides but it was an opportunity lost.
So, with Donald Trump’s spontaneous invitation to meet, we are back at it again. The presenting issue, as always, is not the welfare of North Korean citizens who have suffered under three generations of Kims, particularly those tortured and starved in concentration camps. It is not the very large one million plus active duty army and the 9.5 million member military reserves (out of population of 25 million). It is not the huge number of heavy field guns targeting Seoul, a city of 10 million, across the border in South Korea. It is about the nuclear weapons whose development had actually been pioneered by Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. Under the youthful Kim Jong-un the DPRK’s nuclear development has quickly expanded to the point where it can now potentially threaten the continental United States.
So now we have a meeting of the unprepared and the unwilling. Donald Trump is being actively buffeted by the investigation of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller. He, at the same time, must face the challenge of simply keeping his chaotic administration from self-destructing. He can hardly be really concentrating on this strange tryst in far away Singapore. And, a young isolated overweight diabetic, Kim Jong-un reportedly has had to override his own fears of being overthrown if he leaves his country. He will undoubtedly be prepared (he is famous for that), but as a 35 year old who has never met a Western leader before, he can hardly fall back on a mountain of experience. His view of the imposing, more senior Trump, as a kind of symbol of the rich and hostile West will hardly make him eager to commit to anything that would weaken his position back home.
So what can we expect? One possibility is that the meeting will not occur at all. Both parties have to be seriously conflicted. Each will have demands that the other cannot afford to accept. Kim is not going to really give up his nuclear weapons. To him, they are vital to even his maintaining his regime. Trump cannot afford to remove all of 285,000 American troops from South Korea (a certain North Korean demand). So, the best we can hope for is a kind of meet and greet which begins a long process of gradual change. If that happens, Donald Trump, despite all the uproar will have succeeded to doing something positive. We shall see!
H.J. Rishel
6/05/2018
