US-North Korea dialogue may outlast sunken summit

Analysis

At one level, it is unsurprising and may even be beneficial that the Singapore summit evaporated. Trump's hasty acceptance of a meeting with Kim, brokered by Seoul, put huge pressure on both sides quickly to find some basis for a deal they could each present as a victory (see US-NORTH KOREA: Leaders meet would have modest outcome - March 9, 2018).

Defining denuclearisation

That proved beyond reach, given both sides' differing definitions of denuclearisation:

• Trump has revived his predecessor George W Bush's 'CVID' slogan of complete, verifiable, irreversible (nuclear) disarmament, but added a further, wholly unrealistic demand: immediacy.
• Kim hews to North Korea's consistent concept that denuclearisation will be a phased process over time, and a mutual one where Seoul and Washington also make concessions.

Nonetheless, Mike Pompeo went twice to Pyongyang as CIA director and then as US secretary of state, returning the second time with three Korean-American US citizens jailed there, a show of goodwill from Pyongyang, as was the Punggye-ri dismantling (see UNITED STATES: Pompeo likely to work well with Trump - April 27, 2018).

Reasons or excuses?

The mood changed on May 16 when Pyongyang suddenly cancelled inter-Korean talks due the same day, citing the ongoing US-South Korean 'Max Thunder' military exercises. Over the following week, two North Korean vice foreign ministers insulted members of Trump's administration:

Bolton

Kim Kye-gwan expressed "repugnance" at US National Security Advisor John Bolton, a noted hawk who had suggested Libya's surrender of its weapons of mass destruction as a model for managing the same process in North Korea (see UNITED STATES: New security team will be more hawkish - March 26, 2018).

This provoked Pyongyang: former Libyan leader Muammar al-Qadhafi was later killed by rebels. Trump then said on May 17 that the Libyan model was inappropriate for North Korea and that after a Washington-Pyongyang deal, Kim would stay in office and North Korea could gain economically (see UNITED STATES: Pyongyang is probably placated - May 18, 2018 and see US/NORTH KOREA: Investment ties would grow slowly - May 14, 2018).

Pence

Yesterday, Choe Son-hui called US Vice-President Mike Pence a "dummy" for also citing Libya and other comments and warned she might have to advise Kim to reconsider the summit.

Puzzling Pyongyang

Aside from the 'Libya model' controversy, other aspects of Pyongyang's volte-face are worth puzzling:

• Max Thunder was nothing new; Kim reportedly told a South Korean delegation in March that such routine exercises were acceptable, if their scale was not excessive.
• Whatever Pyongyang's wrath with Trump, cold-shouldering Seoul too is odd, since it destroys the post-April inter-Korean summit bonhomie (see NORTH KOREA: Summit will rebalance power dynamics - April 30, 2018).

North Korean domestic politics may hold the answer: on May 17, Kim chaired a rare meeting of the party Central Military Commission. Personnel changes were reported, but no names published. Potentially, North Korean hardliners forced a slowdown, if not reversal, of Pyongyang's new outreach to enemies.

Unready or misreading?

Consistent with that theory, just after Trump issued his letter, Pompeo told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that his outreach to create teams to prepare concretely for the summit had elicited "no response" from Pyongyang.

Pompeo insisted that the United States, by contrast, was fully ready to proceed. Yet the combination of a tight timeline, many unfilled staff vacancies, a difficult agenda and a still-new and largely untested Trump administration bespeaks a not dissimilar unpreparedness, in several senses, in Washington (see UNITED STATES: Diplomatic service will be degraded - February 14, 2018).

Yet another hypothesis is that both sides were pushing a hard negotiating position but misread each other. North Korea's harsh words lately could have been meant to signal that it was no pushover. Having himself roundly insulted Kim last year, Trump is ill-placed to cite abuse as a reason to back off. Pyongyang may therefore not have expected him to cancel talks.

How will the North react?

The North's first reaction supports this interpretation. Anger was widely expected, but Kim Kye-gwan has issued the notably conciliatory statement, expressing readiness "to sit with" the United States "at any time" to resolve the problem.

While this raises hope, Pyongyang's tone has changed before and will change again. Much now hinges on its broader and longer-term considered reaction. A range of responses is possible, from optimistic to pessimistic and over different timeframes.

Trump's aborting the summit and his timing may be perceived as an insult to Kim. Given Choe's explicit hint, a more effective move would have been to push on CVID such that it was Pyongyang, not Washington, that cancelled the summit. As it is, wounded pride and precedent suggest at the very least future shrill words from Pyongyang, and possibly more than words.

Optimistically, if in fact this is a hardball game of diplomacy that went wrong, both sides still have an incentive to continue quietly negotiating towards a rescheduled summit. Such hopes are not advanced by the odd tone of Trump's letter to Kim yesterday and subsequent comments. Politeness towards Kim is undermined by repeated unsubtle reminders of US military might.

The fear is that Kim will feel compelled to reassert himself as a strong leader not to be taken advantage of. Unless the summit can be rescued, he may well end North Korea's moratorium on nuclear and missile testing and resume intercontinental missile launches.

South scorned?

One touchstone will be how Pyongyang handles Seoul and Moon. Here, policy disarray is evident, and not only from last week's volte-face on inter-Korean talks. South Korean journalists were invited to watch Punggye-ri's destruction, but then the North refused to accept the list of names, only to relent and issue visas at the last moment.

For his own reasons, Moon will strive to maintain inter-Korean momentum. If Kim is subtle, it will now be easier to lure the South into such cooperation as sanctions permit, given the deep dismay caused by Trump's cancellation. If, however, Pyongyang resumes its old general vituperation, calling Seoul a US 'puppet', 2018's peace process must be deemed dead.