One day President Donald Trump threatens to nuke North Korea and appoints the US’s preeminent foreign policy hawk, John Bolton, to be national security advisor. Not long after, Trump flatters Kim Jong-un and signals his desire to negotiate with the North Korean leader.

Trump’s contradictory messages in recent months have introduced an additional element of unpredictability into the US’s relationship with the Koreas, enormously complicating efforts at achieving peace on the peninsula. Even for experts like John Feffer, it’s a “truly disorienting experience” that makes North Korea-US relations “an uneasy issue to track.”

So where do things stand, just days away from the scheduled summit in Singapore between the US and North Korea?

In the following interview, conducted by activist and educator Daniel Falcone, Feffer — director of Foreign Policy in Focus and the author of North Korea/South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis — sketches out the events of the last few months and explains how Trump’s volatile personality is shaping the negotiations.

Daniel Falcone (DF)
The last time you and I discussed North Korea, it was before the arrival of John Bolton. You described US foreign policy in regards to North Korea as a very disorienting process with extreme fluctuations. What has changed with US policy since?

John Feffer (JF)
The changes that took place between the two Koreas as a result of Kim Jong-un reaching out in January (the New Year’s address to South Korea) and the two countries participating together in the Olympics caught the United States by surprise. The administration basically has been playing catch up ever since.

Prior to John Bolton joining the administration, there were basically 2.5 positions in the Trump administration. The first was the hardline position of pushing North Korea as much as possible out of the hope that the regime would ultimately collapse as a result. The other position was to continue to push North Korea hard, not to cause the regime to collapse but to bring it to the negotiating table. That’s been the more conventional foreign policy view in Washington for some time. I say there’s 2.5 positions because Trump himself had employed a strategy of his own — be as belligerent as possible, while also holding out the possibility that he could negotiate some kind of a solution.

There’s also the dynamic of inter-Korean cooperation moving forward independent of the United States — even though both Koreas, frankly, are doing their best to placate Donald Trump, assuring him that he and the United States are important players in this process. Essentially, the process is going far beyond anything anybody in the administration imagined — to the extent that you would have a South Korean delegation come to the United States to brief Trump on what had happened at the inter-Korean summit and present him with an offer from Kim Jong-un to have a one-on-one summit.

I’d argue that North Korea very carefully calculated to appeal to Trump’s sense of importance and vanity and his negotiating skills and impulsiveness. Trump basically decided he’d go forward with the one-on-one summit without very much consultation with any of his advisors. This was the situation on the eve of Bolton joining the White House as national security advisor and the replacement of Rex Tillerson with Mike Pompeo from the CIA, which was a ratcheting up of US strategy.

DF
How has Bolton’s appearance changed the dynamics around negotiations?

JF
A few things should be noted here. First, Bolton didn’t have to go through a congressional confirmation hearing, so he didn’t actually have to present any of his views to anybody. He simply appeared in the White House as perhaps the most important adviser to Trump. Number two, he hasn’t had to waste his time, from his point of view, with any of the largely ceremonial tasks that the secretary of state performs — traveling around to various countries and dealing with things Bolton isn’t interested in.

And third, he has privileged access to the president since he’s not based in Foggy Bottom [the State Department] but in the White House. John Bolton is very crafty, very strategic, and very smart. He’s a lawyer, and he’s been involved in arms control negotiations. He also is well known for his ability to be a sycophant to those above him and to be an absolute bastard to those below him. He knows that he has to carefully manage his superior, Donald Trump. He can’t grandstand. He can’t openly contradict him. He has to work quietly behind the scenes and, like in a Shakespearean drama, pour the poison, very carefully, into Trump’s ear.

Which is what he has done.

He basically undermined Trump’s notion that the North Koreans could be trusted to have a summit, much less negotiate real denuclearization. And then publicly, he sent subtle signals — but not subtle to North Koreans or to people who follow these issues — that this summit is a waste of time: first, by downplaying expectations, and second, by saying that the agenda at the summit is going to be more than just denuclearization, that it will also involve missiles and abductions of South Koreans and Japanese. As a former arms control negotiator, he knows that adding those kinds of elements to the agenda will make it extremely difficult to come up with any kind of agreement.

Finally, he raised the specter of the Libyan model. Everybody knows what the end game was there — the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in a rather ignominious fashion. The North Koreans picked up on that very quickly, and it’s certainly not the scenario they want.

All of this leads to Donald Trump’s recent decision to cancel the summit. He sends them a letter on May 24 to that effect with a veiled threat that he has more nukes than they do, and then backtracks after receiving a very nice letter from the North Koreans about how they’re still open to negotiations. And of course the North Koreans were in the process of destroying their nuclear test site just as Donald Trump was issuing his cancellation. So Trump thinks, oh well, maybe they are serious and we can do what I wanted to do in the first place despite my advisers’ recommendations.

DF
Trump’s May 24 letter has a long first paragraph that’s very simplistic and vague. The second paragraph appears to be feigning outrage over a comment made about Vice President Pence. The third paragraph looks very unofficial. Was the White House anticipating a cancellation and then sent this letter preemptively in your view? How did you react when you read the letter?

JF
I do think that that was the major concern coming from Trump himself: the idea that somehow he would be made a fool of. The first year and a half of his presidency has been all about what a fool he is. He’s been made a fool of by several investigations, he’s been made a fool of by his own pronouncements, he’s been made a fool of by foreign leaders, by the intellectual class, by world public opinion, etc.

This was supposed to be his grand gesture to rescue his reputation and his presidency, at least when it came to foreign policy. And yet he was at risk of again having egg on his face. That explains the tone of the letter. The letter is also very careful to be almost obsequious to Kim Jong-un and keep open the possibility of meeting in the future. This is Donald Trump at his most obvious, where he’s both threatening and obsequious to the same person.

He’s getting differing advice from people around him. The Washington foreign policy community reacted with a great deal of skepticism to the notion that this summit was a good idea or that it would produce any kind of an agreement. The Democratic Party should have been more circumspect in its approach, but it has largely been scornful of Trump for this. Korea watchers thought this was, generally speaking, a lousy idea.

Trump doesn’t necessarily have a lot of intellectual support, or foreign policy support for this particular trajectory — although no doubt there are people who continue to, like the courtiers of yesteryear, say that the president is incredibly wise and deserves a Nobel Prize and that whatever he does, whatever decision he makes, is the right decision. I’m sure he’s getting two streams of advice on this: a stream that is encouraging to him because they are lickspittle advisers and then those that are carefully critical, that represent more mainstream skepticism about North Korea in general.

DF
Does Trump’s letter show how ill prepared the US was for long negotiations? In other words, were they looking for a way out of the summit?

JF
Certainly they are ill prepared for this. That’s kind of an objective reading of the administration at this point. The administration’s North Korea point person, Joseph Yun, has dropped out. You don’t have much Korea experience on the National Security Council.

That doesn’t mean that they couldn’t go ahead with the summit and perhaps get some kind of agreement out of it. But it does mean that they would be going up against negotiators who have repeatedly engaged with both the US and South Korean interlocutors in the past on these complex issues. So almost by definition, even if the administration were to finally appoint people to the positions that are currently vacant, even in the best situation, the US would be at a disadvantage because our democracy rotates elites on a semi-regular basis and North Korea doesn’t rotate its elites like that. They have negotiators with tremendous amounts of experience.

But I don’t think the summit was canceled because the US was understaffed or ill prepared. I think Trump himself has an outsized belief in his own capabilities. He doesn’t really think that he needs any advisers, experts or otherwise. In fact, he believes that the reason the US has failed in the past is precisely because we depended on this cult of experts who have done nothing to get us out of this nuclear situation with North Korea.

DF
You’ve described how US presidents, once on the job, come to this realization that China does not hold the key to unlocking the dilemma with North Korea. Does China have a stake in this? And do you think they have an interest in slowing down North Korean talks with the US?

JF
I do not. I’m not exactly sure what Trump was referring to when he said he thought Kim Jong-un had changed his mind after a second meeting with [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping, other than a desire to deflect responsibility away from the Trump administration itself for the sudden turn in relations.

All indications are that China absolutely wanted the summit to go forward. It wants better relations between the United States and North Korea. It is very much in favor of denuclearization, in general, for North Korea, and for some kind of strategy for economic development in the region — not just its own northeast region, but in Northeast Asia more generally. China wants at least some degree of stability and security in the region.

DF
How about Iran and the recent US exit from the nuclear deal framework? How does North Korea factor in with what Trump and Bolton are up to with regards to Iran?

JF
Trump just wanted to ditch the Iran agreement. Any kind of impact such a decision would have on any other part of the world was superseded by their desire to destroy this agreement.

They might say this sends a strong signal to North Korea. They might say that the kind of nuclear agreement we want with North Korea is certainly not like the one we had with Iran, but instead a much more comprehensive, ironclad one. And that might send that signal to North Korea. But it also might tell North Korea that the Trump administration, and perhaps the United States more generally, is not to be trusted if it signs an agreement in one administration and cancels it in another.

Also, the Trump administration might say this demonstrates that we are willing to take a hardline position in negotiating and if that pisses some people off or seems to risk an escalation in tensions, so be it. But I don’t really think North Korea looks at the situation that way. In part North Korea thinks of itself as unique, so if it’s going to have a relationship with the United States, it’s going to be different from Iran for a variety of reasons. Second, North Korea is focused almost exclusively on Trump himself rather than the entourage around him, and I think they believe that they can make a deal with him, and not with the Washington consensus.

So from that point of view, the Iran agreement doesn’t really matter because Trump had never been involved in the negotiating of it. They also might be calculating that this is a long-term process, and whatever they can get started under Trump can establish a dynamic that would be difficult for future administrations to break away from.

DF
What do you think will happen on June 12?

JF
I’m not sure the summit’s going to take place on June 12. There’s a good possibility that it will be postponed. If you look at it from simply an electoral point of view, June 12 is not the best time for Donald Trump to orchestrate a great diplomatic coup. It would be much better to do it closer to the midterm elections. Even though foreign policy doesn’t usually influence US elections all that much — and midterm elections even less — something grand on the international stage could nevertheless be useful for the Republican Party going into the elections.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Feffer is director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and the author of North Korea/South Korea: U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Daniel Falcone is an activist, educator, and journalist in New York City.

* Jacobin, 06.08.2018:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/donald-trump-north-korea-nuclear-weapons-singapore-summit

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 Do Democrats Want a War With North Korea?

7 June 2018

Just a year ago, liberals were terrified of Trump starting a war with North Korea. Now they seem scared he might defuse the standoff with Pyongyang.

It was only a year ago that high-profile Democrats and liberals were terrified by the prospect of Donald Trump starting a war with North Korea. Now it seems the only thing that scares them more is the prospect of peace.

With a week to go until Trump’s historic meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore, top Senate Democrats have signed on to a letter laying out a set of stringent demands they insisted must be met for them to support a deal. These demands include, among other things, complete denuclearization, as well as “anywhere, anytime” inspections.

Trump accused Democrats of “rooting against” the negotiations, and it’s hard not to see it that way. An immediate agreement on full denuclearization, for instance, is a tall order given that North Korea’s leadership has seen what’s happened to other states that agreed to give up their WMDs. MIT political scientist Vipin Narang called the demands “delusional” and compared them to something John Bolton would have written, while Arms Control Today’s Kingston Reif called the letter an “ill-advised attempt by the Dem leadership to get to the right of Trump,” laying out an “aggressively maximalist standard” that, if applied to Iran, would have ruled out Obama’s nuclear deal with that country.

But the Democrats’ actions are right in line with the peculiar transformation that many prominent liberals have been undergoing in recent months on the subject of Korea. Initially terrified that an inexperienced and unstable president might drag the US into another war, since March they’ve seemed more concerned by the opposite prospect: that the hapless, bumbling Trump might actually achieve something that eluded earlier presidents, reaching some kind of breakthrough in negotiations. So they began deploying hawkish attacks against the talks.

When Trump first agreed to the summit with Kim, Rachel Maddow called it a “gift” to the North Korean leadership, which has “dreamed” of forcing the US to “acknowledge them as an equal.”

“Maybe every other previous US president who decided not to meet with the North Korean dictator only did so because they were too dumb and not savvy enough to know how to pull off a meeting with the North Koreans safely and to our country’s advantage,” she said sarcastically.

For the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, it was a “dangerous gamble and a bad idea,” a “gift,” and a “mistake” to “give that away without getting anything back at the beginning” — citing in particular the three Americans held prisoner in the country. (The three were released a few months later). NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell likewise called it “a very big gamble” that exchanged the “prestige of a meeting” for nothing, and warned North Korea might be building more weapons as the talks unfold.

Jeremy Bash, Obama’s former Pentagon and CIA chief of staff and a military-industrial complex beneficiary, declared it a “major concession.” One MSNBC guest had a different objection to the high-level talks: “It proves that North Korea is a real state. It is distinct from South Korea. It’s independent. It’s a real country.” (Apparently North Korea wasn’t a real country until Trump decided to talk one-on-one with its leader despite its UN membership).

Since then, the objections have only become more petty. After assailing Trump for childishly name-calling Kim throughout 2017, Democrats now started attacking him for calling Kim “very honorable.” Evelyn Farkas, deputy assistant secretary of defense under Obama, charged Trump on MSNBC with “fawning over the North Koreans,” while Jeremy Bash, fresh from defending an admitted CIA torturer, criticized Trump for praising a “murderous, thuggish regime.” Nancy Pelosi reportedly said Kim would be having a “giggle fit” after Trump cancelled the summit, and that the letter Trump received from the dictator was “kind of like a valentine.”

It’s not hard to see what’s going on here. Democrats and liberal commentators are so deeply invested in their anti-Trumpism that they’ve lost the ability to interpret the world through any other prism.

Would any of these commentators have lodged the same objections had it been Obama, not Trump, who who was offering to meet one-on-one with a hostile leader? The answer is surely no: Obama famously spent the 2008 campaign telling crowds that he would gladly meet with “adversaries” without preconditions — a constructive stance for which he was pilloried by the Right. Now, those right-wing objections have been flipped around and retooled by Obama’s defenders for use against their current political adversary. It’s either rank cynicism or cognitive dissonance — and at this point it’s hard to know what’s worse.

Is it ideal that America’s first summit meeting with a North Korean leader is being spearheaded by Donald Trump? Of course not. And chances are that Trump’s ultra-bellicose coterie of advisers will still end up nixing any wide-ranging deal. But surely Trump’s clumsy attempts at diplomacy are vastly preferable to the tit-for-tat war of words and military provocations that characterized the first year of his presidency and terrified the world. And apparently the US public agrees: polls have consistently shown overwhelming support for the summit.

For Democrats to wage a public relations campaign to undermine negotiations intended to defuse a dangerous nuclear standoff is not just hypocritical but irresponsible. To be sure, if Trump does end up securing an agreement with North Korea, he will no doubt make political hay of it. So what? A world where Trump gets to brag about his dealmaking skills is surely preferable to a nuclear war.

Branko Marcetic

Branko Marcetic is an editorial assistant at Jacobin. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

* Jacobin, 06.07.2018:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/trump-north-korea-kim-negotiations-deal

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 Trump is a useless negotiator, and Kim Jong-un will know that

The president’s desperation shows, and he has no eye for detail – flaws that have seen him suckered countless times

Next week will see tested one of the enduring fictions of current politics: the myth of Donald Trump, master negotiator. That the myth lives on was demonstrated afresh on Thursday with the leaking of after-dinner remarks by Boris Johnson urging his audience to “imagine Trump doing Brexit”. The foreign secretary fantasised about the US president going in “bloody hard”. Perhaps growing flushed at the prospect, he mused: “Actually, you might get somewhere. It’s a very, very good thought.”

Johnson was merely echoing the US president’s perennial boast that he brings to geopolitics the skills of a boardroom maestro. When Trump launched his candidacy in 2015, he declared: “We need a leader that wrote The Art of the Deal.”

On Tuesday, Trump will have the chance to demonstrate this self-vaunted talent when he comes face-to-face with Kim Jong-un of North Korea – just two unpredictable guys with terrifying nuclear arsenals getting to know each other. The first instinct of all those who prefer peace to Armageddon will surely be to wish the two men luck. Even those who are squeamish at the sight of a red carpet rolled out for the hereditary dictator of a slave state with a record of starving and torturing its own people know the lines. Jaw-jaw is better than war-war. You make peace with your enemies, not your friends. Engagement is always better than isolation.

If any other president were sitting in the Oval Office, all that would make sense. As it is, Tuesday’s meeting in Singapore induces a queasy pessimism, most of it attributable to the fact that, far from being a genius of the negotiating table, Donald Trump’s record as a dealmaker is appallingly bad.

A revealing essay in Politico starts, comically enough, with The Art of the Deal itself. It turns out that Trump negotiated a terrible deal for himself on that very book: the ghostwriter received an unheard-of 50% of the advance fee, 50% of all subsequent earnings and equal billing on the cover. The writer, Tony Schwartz, didn’t even have to push Trump hard. “He basically just agreed,” he recalls.

The other examples are no less arresting. After the success of the first season of The Apprentice, Trump demanded an increase in his fee per show from $50,000 to $1m. What did the magician of the deal get? An increase to $60,000. His failings are basic. Even a child negotiating a toy swap in a playground knows you must never seem too keen. If your opponent smells your desperation, they’ll make you pay. Yet in one negotiation, Trump couldn’t sit still, pacing around the room. His opponent recalled: “It was as if he had a blinking sign on his forehead that continually flashed: ‘URGENT! URGENT!’”

Whether he was buying a casino or a shuttle airline, he repeatedly paid tens of millions over the odds. The projects failed, leading to him filing for corporate bankruptcy six times. Even his one-time admirers say that whatever sharpness Trump had in the mid-80s, he lost long ago. Two weaknesses are particularly troubling ahead of the meeting in Singapore. Trump doesn’t do detail, in contrast to Kim, who is said to be fully across the technical specifics of his country’s nuclear programme. And he struggles to understand any motive besides money. Perhaps that’s no problem for a real-estate tycoon. But in politics he misses the myriad other pressures that define what is and is not possible. (It’s why he failed to put together a healthcare reform package that even his fellow Republicans could agree on.)

None of this is hypothetical. On one measure, Trump’s handling of talks with Pyongyang has already been a disaster. For he has given away one of the most valuable bargaining chips the US holds – a meeting on equal terms with an American president – and got nothing in return. This is worth stressing, especially to those crediting Trump’s aggressive tweeting with bullying Kim to the table. The North Koreans have yearned for a summit, and the legitimacy it confers, for a quarter of a century. Clinton, Bush or Obama could all have got the “win” of a summit with Kim or his father in a heartbeat. They chose not to because they decided Pyongyang was not offering enough in return. As the Korea analyst Robert E Kelly tweeted, in Trump-style capitals: “TRUMP IS GIVING STUFF AWAY, not wheeling and dealing his way into some great achievement.”

The same will be true if Trump announces a peace treaty between the North and South Korea on Tuesday, and his media amplifiers trumpet it as a historic breakthrough even if it comes without a serious concession on Kim’s part. That isn’t negotiation: it’s just giving Kim a prize. It’s not the art of the deal: it’s the art of the giveaway. (Trump did the same with recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. He gave that away, too, winning no Israeli concessions in return.)

The dangers are clear. The North Koreans will play Trump. They’ve reportedly studied The Art of the Deal, learning how to manipulate him and his ego: witness the oversized, gameshow-style envelope in which they delivered Kim’s latest letter to the president. Unwilling to listen to aides, refusing to prepare (“I don’t think I have to,” he said on Thursday. “It’s about the attitude”) and with no eye for detail, he is liable to concede something vital and not even realise he has done it.

Which brings us to perhaps the most crucial problem. Let’s say Kim refuses to budge meaningfully. Can anyone imagine Trump, craving a win before November’s midterm elections, emerging from the meeting in Singapore and candidly admitting, “We tried our best but I’m afraid we fell short”? The reality TV star has already storyboarded the pictures: handshakes and signatures, followed by talk of a historic breakthrough and a Nobel peace prize.

In other words, even if he doesn’t get enough from Kim, he’ll say he has. He’ll do what he always has, even back in his Manhattan real-estate days: he’ll spin failure as success. It makes Kim the winner on Tuesday even before they start, his acquisition of nuclear weapons rewarded – thereby incentivising other dictators to follow his lead.

Trump is not a master negotiator: he’s a conman. We need to be on our guard – for it’s the world that risks being suckered.

Jonathan Freedland
@Freedland

* The Guardian, Fri 8 Jun 2018 17.30 BST Last modified on Fri 8 Jun 2018 22.00 BST:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/08/trump-master-negotiator-meeting-kim-jong-un-art-of-deal

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 Russia attempts to regain clout over North Korea

Unlike the West, Russia does not want the Kim Jong-un regime to collapse - or change at all.

Russia’s frenetic attempts to hop on the bandwagon of historic diplomatic talks between the United States and North Korea underline two simple facts: Pyongyang no longer depends on Russia for its economic and political survival, and Russia does not want the North’s regime to change.

North Korea emerged from the quagmire of the Korean War 65 years ago as red Moscow’s loyal, obedient vassal that diligently copied the Stalinist system - and preserved most of its frightening features such as a pervasive personality cult of the Kim dynasty, labour camps, and mass purges.

Its inefficiently planned economy relied heavily on Soviet food and fuel supplies, and the Communist giant’s 1991 collapse contributed to a perennial famine that killed up to 3.5 million North Koreans. A year earlier, Moscow established ties with South Korea - ruining diplomatic ties with the North for a decade.

A political generation later, Kim Jong-un, a whimsical and inexperienced despot, understands one thing about his impoverished, militarised and nuclearised nation of 25 million.

“It is not Moscow’s puppet,” Konstantin Asmolov of the Center for Korean Studies of under the Russian Academy of Sciences told Al Jazeera.

Belated invitation

Last Thursday, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put a wreath of flowers at the feet of the gigantic, 20 metre-tall bronze statues of Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founder, and his son and successor, Kim Jong-il, on the sacred Mansu Hill in Pyongyang.

Then he bowed - an unnecessary gesture for a diplomat of his rank, that, nevertheless, earned him an unplanned audience with the third Kim, the Kommersant, a Russian daily, concluded.

Lavrov held talks with the “supreme leader” ahead of the Trump-Kim summit, the first-ever meeting between a sitting US president and a North Korean helmsman that is scheduled to take place in Singapore on June 12.

Russia feels sidelined and Lavrov’s carefully phrased “diplomatese” hinted at Moscow’s dissatisfaction with the hasty development - and its desire to join in.

“We shouldn’t try to make sudden movements, shouldn’t speed up the process artificially that will, of course, require a considerable amount of time,” he said in televised remarks referring to the possible denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.

“Russia is ready to contribute to these efforts, our Korean friends welcome it, and we have discussed some steps that can be taken in this direction,” Lavrov said.

He also mentioned the possible revival of long-mothballed projects to build a natural gas pipeline, a railway, and a power transmission line from Russia to South Korea via the North’s territory.

But it will all become possible only if the United Nations and the West lift the sanctions imposed on North Korea for its nuclear programme, he said.

He also invited Kim to Russia for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In the Soviet era, such visits were frequent and obligatory for Kim’s grandfather who once commanded a Soviet battalion during World War II, and was handpicked by Joseph Stalin to rule the nascent Korean Communist state. His son and heir was born near the eastern Russian city of Khabarovsk in 1941.

This time, North Korean media simply acknowledged the reception of the invitation.

Reunification concerns

Russia has shared a 17-kilometre-long border with North Korea since 1860, and hundreds of thousands of ethnic Koreans who migrated to Tsarist Russia still live in the former Soviet Union. One of them, Viktor Tsoi, remains an immensely popular Russian rock star 28 years after his death in a car crash.

Moscow is not interested in a new Chernobyl in its scarcely populated yet resource-rich Pacific provinces in case the Korean conflict goes boom.

Unlike the West, Russia does not want the Kim regime to collapse - or change at all. If there is a civil war or yet another famine, an exodus of refugees and a mishandling of nuclear weapons spell disaster for Russia’s Far East.

A unification of North and South Koreas could also prove disastrous for Moscow’s policies in Asia.

After the reunification of Germany and the pro-Western transformation of the Communist bloc, NATO approached Russia’s borders. Something similar is likely on the Korean Peninsula - a unified Korea will inevitably become Washington’s ally, which means more US bases on the Russian border.

However, Russia does not have enough economic leverage to influence things in North Korea.

Tens of thousands of North Korean labour migrants work throughout Russia, while their government appropriates most of their wages. Their deportation - the Kremlin’s favourite way of solving political problems with ex-Soviet republics.

Russian support

Western observers noted after Lavrov’s visit that Russia can still play a role in the Kim-Trump talks, although not very crucial.

“As North Korea and the US continue their discussions ahead of the summit, it looks increasingly likely Moscow will not be able to have a direct effect on whether the Singapore meeting happens or not,” Christ Stevenson, international editor of The Independent, a British daily, wrote.

“However, Mr Lavrov’s Pyongyang visit has reminded the US and their allies that any long-term deal will likely need Russian support - and has placed Moscow back in the thick of another international crisis,” he wrote.

One of Russia’s foremost experts on North Korea says that Moscow will act as guarantor of the agreements Trump and Kim will reach in Singapore.

“There is an agreement between Russia, China and North Korea that in case accords are reached [with the US], Russia and China will serve as guarantors of these accords,” Andrey Fyodorov, who once served as Russia’s ex-deputy foreign minister, told Al Jazeera.

“Kim is in a situation when he is not losing anything,” he said. “Another issue is that Kim is not making a deal with Trump without guarantees.”

And that’s where Russia will step in - with its veto power at the United Nations Security Council, an old itch to counter and contradict the US whenever and wherever it can, and a domestic propaganda machine that will extol anything the Kremlin does - even if a step is miniscule and irrelevant in comparison with the USSR’s former clout on the Korean Peninsula.

“Russia’s role is increasing and that is right,” Vladimir Terekhov, a Russian expert on the Asia-Pacific region, told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency in early June.

North Korea “is our neighbour that cares”, he added.

Mansur Mirovalev

* 6 Jun 2018:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/06/russia-attempts-regain-clout-north-korea-180605193845968.html

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 Trump and Bolton spurn top-level North Korea planning

After two months on the job, Trump’s new national security adviser has not called a single Cabinet-level National Security Council meeting on North Korea.

National security adviser John Bolton has yet to convene a Cabinet-level meeting to discuss President Donald Trump’s upcoming summit with North Korea next week, a striking break from past practice that suggests the Trump White House is largely improvising its approach to the unprecedented nuclear talks.

For decades, top presidential advisers have used a methodical process to hash out national security issues before offering the president a menu of options for key decisions. On an issue like North Korea, that would mean White House Situation Room gatherings of the secretaries of state and defense along with top intelligence officials, the United Nations ambassador, and even the Treasury secretary, who oversees economic sanctions.

But since Trump agreed on a whim to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un on March 8, the White House’s summit planning has been unstructured, according to a half-dozen administration officials. Trump himself has driven the preparation almost exclusively on his own, consulting little with his national security team beyond Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has made two visits to Pyongyang to meet with Kim personally. Trump has also not presided personally over a meeting of those senior NSC officials, as a president typically does when making the most important decisions.

Senior officials from both the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations called the absence of a formal interagency process before such a consequential meeting troubling. Peter Feaver, a former National Security Council official in the Bush White House, said his colleagues would likely have held “quite a few” meetings of the so-called Principals Committee of Cabinet-level NSC members in a comparable situation. A former top Obama White House official echoed that point, calling the lack of top-level NSC meetings “shocking.”

On Thursday, the president showed little concern himself. Speaking to reporters before a White House meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe he said: “I don’t think I have to prepare very much. It’s about attitude. It’s about willingness to get things done.”

Trump’s ad hoc approach to talks with Kim, with whom he has traded threats of nuclear war, partly reflects the disorder that has always gripped the Trump White House — itself a reflection of the commander in chief’s management style.

But officials say the policymaking process across the White House, never a tightly organized affair, has recently grown less disciplined. They point to John Kelly’s loosening grip on the West Wing, at which Trump has always chafed, and with it, the dissolution of many of the processes he tried to institute when he arrived a year ago. This has affected not just North Korea but the president’s recent imposition of tariffs on American allies. Many also cite Trump’s frustration with Bolton, who has irritated the president after just two months on the job.

Without that coordinated process, the president “cannot understand the equities that different elements of the government have in this,” said a former senior Bush administration official who served both in the White House and at the State Department. The White House declined to comment for this article.

Part of the problem is Trump’s on-and-off chemistry with Bolton. The president fumed after Bolton spoke of a hard-line “Libya model” for North Korean denuclearization on CBS News in late April — implying that the U.S. would make no concessions until after Kim had physically surrendered his nuclear program. After North Korea responded furiously, Trump blamed Bolton for derailing the summit. In turn, Trump dictated to Bolton a letter to Kim canceling the nuclear summit and insisted that Bolton read it back to him.

On Friday, when a top North Korean official arrived in Washington, the president did not invite Bolton to join them in the Oval Office — another departure from tradition, in which the national security adviser attends every significant meeting with a foreign official. A second former Bush NSC official said he could not recall a single important meeting for which the president’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was not present.

“The pageantry of who’s in or not does matter here, and I think the president is probably signaling that that kind of a model is not what he has in mind,” Suzanne DiMaggio, director and senior fellow at the New America Foundation, said at a Monday lunch for reporters.

Bolton will nevertheless travel to North Korea with the president, presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway said Wednesday.

“He’ll be part of those talks. The absence of someone in any one meeting, any one event, means absolutely nothing other than they weren’t in that particular meeting,” she said. But it remains unclear exactly what role the national security adviser will play at the summit, to be held at a posh resort hotel in Singapore. The North Korean government described Bolton last month as “repugnant” and previously called him “human scum.”

Pompeo and Kelly will also travel to Singapore with Trump, and Pompeo, who has emerged as the lead American negotiator with North Korea, has met twice previously with Kim in Pyongyang.

The absence of interagency meetings on North Korea also reflects the breakdown of Kelly’s effort to impose traditional policymaking processes at the White House — which extends beyond national security to issues like trade, where Trump’s position has veered back and forth with little sign of a coherent plan.

“There isn’t the kind of order that Kelly had started to impose when he came in. Kelly has really backed off in a lot of ways; he is really not playing an assertive role,” said a third former Bush administration official who remains in close contact with several Trump aides. “When they need a presidential decision, everybody kind of tries to manipulate things to get the decision that they want.”

That’s precisely what Kelly tried to change when he took the reins last July, insisting that the president close the doors of the Oval Office to prevent aides from wandering in to cajole him on one issue or another or to drop articles on his desk in an attempt to sway his views.

But the White House feels as though it has returned to the early days of 2017, when then-chief of staff Reince Priebus exercised little control and the policymaking process was nonexistent.

Kelly’s arrival initially sparked a change. The retired Marine general charged former staff secretary Rob Porter with overseeing the White House’s various policy councils, including the NSC, and insisted the president take no action without first signing a decision memo presenting the recommendations of various Cabinet departments and agencies and any disagreements they might have.

Kelly’s diminishing status and staff changes have eroded those processes. Porter left the White House in February in the wake of domestic abuse allegations. His replacement, Derek Lyons, did not inherit Porter’s title of assistant to the president for policy coordination and has not developed the same chemistry with the president.

The departures of economic adviser Gary Cohn and his deputy, Jeremy Katz, has also unraveled a tightly controlled trade policy process. Cohn and Porter used interagency planning meetings to help rein in the president’s impulsive decisions.

But those days are over. Cohn’s replacement, Larry Kudlow, has the president’s ear, but he has yet to find a permanent deputy to help him run the National Economic Council. Shahira Knight holds the job on an acting basis but plans to leave the White House in the coming weeks, and the White House has not settled on a permanent replacement.

Meanwhile, the administration’s statements on trade have careened in every direction. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Fox News late last month that a possible trade fight with allies was “on hold” — days before Trump smacked Canada, Mexico and the European Union with steel and aluminum tariffs.

On core national security issues, some say disorder has spread since Trump fired national security adviser H.R. McMaster in late March.

“McMaster was all about process, almost to a fault,” said a former Trump White House official. “He revamped the NSC to where they were having tons of meetings, and we made sure that before the president did anything there was a policy process.”

Others, however, argue that McMaster convened too many meetings and that Bolton, who holds fewer, is nonetheless more effective. One senior administration official said that under Bolton, meetings of the Principals Committee — which have been held on issues other than North Korea — are more focused than before. The official added that the administration has benefited from Bolton’s closer political alignment with the president than that of McMaster, who had deep reservations about Trump’s worldview.

Many Asia experts worry that Trump is, as one former Bush official who worked on Asia policy recently put it to POLITICO, “going to wing this summit.” The concern is shared by Japanese government officials who consider North Korea a threat to their security and worry Trump might cut a superficial deal that does too little to disarm Kim.

Conway on Wednesday insisted that Trump is hard at work in preparation for the summit, scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday. But when pressed, she declined to elaborate on any specifics. “This president prepares in many different ways for many different major summits,” she told reporters. “It is structured, it is extensive, it is, at this point, intense.”

ELIANA JOHNSON

Annie Karni contributed to this report.

* 06/07/2018 05:05 AM EDT Updated 06/07/2018 01:29 PM EDT:
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/07/trump-bolton-north-korea-630362

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 Pompeo: Reports of rift with Bolton on North Korea ’a complete joke’

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday called reports of a rift on North Korea between himself and national security adviser John Bolton “a complete joke,” even as he acknowledged that the two advisers to President Donald Trump were likely to “disagree with great consistency over time.”

During the White House press briefing, Pompeo was asked to explain the extent of his disagreements with Bolton on North Korea amid reports the two officials have clashed on their approaches to negotiating with the North’s government. Pompeo, a leading figure in the ongoing discussions with the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, and other North Korean officials, framed his disputes with Bolton as ordinary differences of opinion.

“I love good fiction as much as the next person,” Pompeo told reporters, “but it is without foundation, so much so that, you know, I’ll be polite, since I’m a diplomat now — suffice it to say, those articles are unfounded and a complete joke.”

He added: “Ambassador Bolton and I will disagree with great consistency over time. I’m confident. We’re two individuals. We’re each going to present our views. I’m confident that will happen on issues from how long this press conference ought to go to issues that really matter to the world.”

The secretary of state added that the president “demands” that his advisers give him their unfiltered opinions on foreign policy matters, even if they at times clash with others in the White House.

The remarks come as the White House continues to prepare for a historic summit between Trump and Kim in Singapore next Tuesday.

Trump told reporters on Thursday at a bilateral press conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan that he saw a “tremendous” upside to the negotiations with Kim over the North’s nuclear program, while warning that he is prepared to walk away from the negotiating table should talks sour.

The meeting is the culmination of months of negotiations and planning with North Korea by Trump, Pompeo, Bolton and other top administration officials.

CRISTIANO LIMA

* 06/07/2018 05:02 PM EDT:
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/07/mike-pompeo-john-bolton-north-korea-631548

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