OPINION:
In July last year in Pyongyang, Ri Su-Yong, member of the executive of the Politburo and head of the international department of the Workers’ Party of Korea, quoted headlines from Britain’s right-wing Daily Mail about the tens of thousands demonstrating against President Trump’s visit to the United Kingdom and asked quizzically, “why do so many people hate the President?”
My response, as someone with a quarter of a century representing the British Labor Party in the European Parliament, a period as deputy leader of the Socialist Group behind me and who twice voted for Jeremy Corbyn as Party Leader, was that I struggled to find a single thing I shared with Mr. Trump save his approach to North Korea.
Six months on nothing has changed. I still disagree with the president across the board apart for his engagement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Pyongyang on what is, as Barack Obama argued, the most challenging foreign policy issue facing Washington.
Between December 2017 and February 2018, the world was on the verge of an armed confrontation which would have inevitably gone nuclear. I was in Pyongyang, Seoul and Washington during that period talking to the key decision-makers and the world was a hair-trigger away from war.
There was talk of giving Mr. Kim a “bloody nose” by taking out a missile in flight, a launch site or launch vehicle, or merely “disappearing” one of the North’s submarines. Any or all of which would have given Mr. Kim little option but to launch a military response against Tokyo and Seoul. Pyongyang’s nuclear doctrine reflects weakness rather than strength, and as an upshot a wildly asymmetric balance of power.
With no probability of its nuclear deterrent surviving a U.S. strike, it pursues a “Scorpion Policy” of a pre-emptive retaliation. Use them or lose them. There is no possible victory only hara-kiri by proxy. Pyongyang’s trigger is so sensitive that it would fire without a smoke. As Bob Woodward recounts in his book “Fear,” H.R. McMaster received a warning at the White House that Ri Su-Yong had told intermediaries “that the North would take the evacuation of U.S. civilians as a sign of imminent attack.” I was one of those who passed on that message. The world was a tweet away from nuclear war.
Mr. Trump’s bold offer of a summit dragged the Peninsula back from the brink. The subsequent Singapore Summit created a framework for a new era of peace and normalization of relations with the two sides embarking on denuclearization of the Peninsula and Pyongyang’s co-operation in the repatriation of remains of MIAs from the Korean War.
Nevertheless, it is plain that the last eight months have been a profound disappointment for both Washington and Pyongyang as commitments were unfulfilled. The promised “end of war” declaration was never made and the North waiting impatiently unsurprisingly refused to budge. Yet it stuck both by its promise of no testing and the continued production of nuclear weapons and ICBMs. In this year’s New Year’s address, Mr. Kim cued his continued engagement with a unilateral commitment to ending nuclear weapons production and proliferation. Hanoi provides the opportunity to reset the clock and move forward.
All the indications are that Mr. Kim will offer to close down Yongbyon’s graphite-moderated reactor and associated facilities — the source of the North’s weapons-grade plutonium — and provide the associated inventory of nuclear holdings and allow the United States to dispatch inspectors to the site in exchange for the long awaited end of war declaration, an exchange of liaison offices between Washington and Pyongyang and some mitigation of the final round of U.N. sanctions that would snap back into place immediately if Pyongyang failed to deliver.
Almost more importantly, Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim would agree to a process with a series of working groups reporting to future summits to ensure the process is continually shepherded forward.
There are twin dangers this will be frustrated in Washington. First, both leaders are well ahead of their respective administrations. Pyongyang has read both “Fear” and “I Am Part Of The Resistance Inside The Trump Administration” (New York Times, Sept. 5 2018), which is why they will need the constant reassurance and re-dedication provided by serial summits.
Second, it dies on the collateral response of the Democrats in Congress. This deal must cross over and bridge presidencies. They should revisit the consequences of past sectarianism. President Clinton signed the Agreed Framework in 1994 that halted the North’s plutonium production and nuclear program for a short decade despite Republican sniping, while the subsequent attempt by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the president in 1999 to agreed a “buyout” of Pyongyang’s missile program was as a result strangled by Florida’s hanging chads.
Democrats have a duty to the America people — and the world — to demonstrate a level of responsibility that was missing from congressional Republicans nearly a quarter of a century ago.
• Glyn Ford is a former Labor member of the European Parliament and author of “Talking to North Korea” (2018).
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