|
At 9am local time on Tuesday, June 12 (9pm Monday, June 11 in DC), President Donald Trump will meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Singapore. The summit marks the first time that a sitting US president will have met with a leader of North Korea.
The road to the summit has been bumpy, though President Trump indicated yesterday that if the summit goes well, he may invite Kim to the White House
The following American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholars are available to comment on the summit, as well as its implications for US-North Korean relations specifically and for the region generally:
Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy Nicholas Eberstadt The most important thing for American negotiators to understand is that North Korea is a “revisionist state”… None of the ordinary rules of diplomacy apply with North Korea. For a revisionist state, negotiations constitute war by other means. That means there is no “win-win,” no “getting to yes.” This is not like entering into a trade deal with Belgium. North Korean officialdom believes only in “win-lose” outcomes… If American diplomats insist on treating North Korea more or less like any other state, the coming negotiations will bring hapless results no different from those of the past, even as the peril for the US and its allies grows ever greater. Instead the Trump administration should consider a totally new approach. -from With Kim Jong Un, there’s no ‘win-win’
Director of Asian Studies and Resident Fellow Dan Blumenthal Historically, every peace negotiation between American diplomats with hostile dictators was premised on the idea that the adversary had made a decision to change course. There is, however, no indication that North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is following these models. Without a real change from Kim, there is no hope for peace with North Korea, no possibility of complete and verifiable irreversible dismantlement (CVID) of Kim’s weapons of mass destruction, and little genuine interest in opening up to America’s economy. -from How would we know if North Korea really wants peace?
Jean Kirkpatrick Visiting Scholar Oriana Skylar Mastro While North Korea and the United States will be vying for the upper hand, the ultimate winner will be Beijing. China is in the best position among all three to drive events in its favor — to ensure that there is no war and no collapse. -from Why Xi Jinping wants to broker the Trump-Kim deal
Resident Scholar Michael Rubin on the upcoming summit: It’s déjà vu all over again. Trump has become Jimmy Carter 2.0, and Kim Jong-un is laughing his way to the bank, expecting concessions to do what the North Korean regime has repeatedly been paid to do. Meanwhile, North Korea continues to be the world’s most repressive regime, replete with concentration camps and public executions. If the history of US negotiations with rogue regimes shows anything, it is that rogue leaders don’t change their stripes, they only get rich off of diplomacy.
Research Fellow Zack Cooper on the upcoming summit: The Trump-Kim summit will not be the end of US tensions with North Korea. Indeed, as Winston Churchill said, it will not even be the beginning of the end, but at best the end of the beginning. The next steps — ascertaining whether Kim Jong Un is serious about denuclearization — will be much more difficult. And the longer the negotiations continue, the greater the potential they have to distract US policymakers from the more important regional concern: China.
To arrange an interview with any of the AEI scholars, please contact AEI Media Services at mediaservices@aei.org or 202.862.5829.
|
