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I'm uncomfortable with Trump's recent language re: Kim Jong-un - I thought "Little Rocket Man" was more appropriate - but it's pretty obvious what he's trying to do. I question the conventional wisdom that denuclearization should be negotiated behind the scenes by bureaucrats.
The bureaucratic approach doesn't work with psycho dictatorships like North Korea. It's been tried for 30 years. NK always does the same thing: make a few symbolic, easily reversed concessions, pocket everything they were given, and start the whole damn thing again.
The recurring problem is that North Korea calculates the pressure against them will always abate long before they reach the point of real desperation. They don't think any replay of this game ever ends with them having no choice but to completely denuclearize.
The Trump team always seemed like careful students of previous failed negotiations, and some of them are definitely hard-nosed about North Korea - Pompeo, Bolton, etc. They must have known at the outset NK would just try to run out the clock on sanctions again.
The North Koreans think it's impossible to maintain sanctions tough enough, for long enough, to truly damage the regime. Their hole cards are support from bad actors like Russia, China, and Iran, and their willingness to take their own people hostage against sanctions.
This process was always fated to reach a moment when North Korea's allies said it deserves sanctions relief, those allies were ready to cheat more or openly break from the sanctions regime, and humanitarian groups were lamenting the suffering of the North Korean people.
At that moment, North Korea would make some half-hearted offer of symbolic "cooperation" and demand either full sanctions relief or partial relief that would effectively unravel the sanctions regime in short order. It's basically the same play they run every single time.
It's a play much more easily run if all the negotiations are happening behind the scenes. Getting the dictator personally involved makes it a little harder, especially when the U.S. president is making a great show of good personal relations with him.
North Korea always looks for the concessions that will unravel the sanctions regime and international consensus against it. The reverse of that strategy is to look for the North Korean concessions that will unravel their nuclear program, perhaps faster than they think.
To get there, it is necessary to make complying with denuclearization look very attractive and intransigence look very costly. The latter can only be achieved if North Korea knows its usual game plan won't work - that we ARE prepared to maintain total pressure until it hurts.
Whatever else comes of the Hanoi summit, it sends a clear message that we're serious. Trump had every political reason to settle for a bad deal he could market as an unprecedented diplomatic success. Most of his predecessors would have done it.
Kim's analysts were probably devouring oceans of American media and telling him Trump would be desperate to get anything he could portray as a triumph. The media might have inadvertently helped Trump by leading Kim to underestimate his resolve.
Virtually every indicator available to North Korean analysts would have told them Kim could roll Trump by offering something that looked good in exchange for concessions that would unravel the sanctions regime.
But Trump said no: it's complete, irreversible denuclearization or nothing. Conflicting accounts from U.S. and North Korean sources make it sound like Trump pushed for something specific that Kim was not willing to give. That must be the thread that would unravel NK's ambitions.
North Korea will probe the international consensus for cracks in resolve over the next few weeks. The U.S. will work hard to ensure there aren't any. NK must then contemplate the beginning of real pain, for the regime not just the people, from sanctions in the year ahead.
At that point, maybe Kim Jong-un will reassess the offer made to him in Hanoi and reconsider his reluctance to give whatever the deal-breaker was. That one thread could come loose, exactly the way North Korea always found a loose thread in sanctions to tug on in the past.
And it won't look like a humiliating defeat, because beaming salesman Donald Trump will be sitting at the table, twiddling a pen and talking about all the great opportunities waiting for North Korea if they sign on the dotted line. He set it up to look like win-win.
It may not work. Maybe NOTHING will. But it seems more plausible than trying the same approach that hasn't worked for 30 years. Setting it up requires saying queasy things about a monstrous regime. If it works, it was worth it. If it doesn't, we'll all be worse than queasy. /end
