Stop grading Donald Trump on a curve when it comes to North Korea. The job of the president of the United States is to keep the American people safe and defend U.S. national security interests. No matter how bad Trump may be at his job, he must be held to the same standard as other presidents. Coming out of the Singapore summit meeting between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, many people are claiming that we are now in a better place than we were when Trump was threatening war.
If you feel yourself breathing a sigh of relief and thanking Trump, please stop. Of course, any diplomacy is better than war, but that’s not the point. The choice between war and diplomacy is a false one fabricated by the president over the past year. He threatened to start an unnecessary and preventive war with North Korea. Now he is claiming to have saved everyone from the danger of nuclear war that he caused in the first place. Trump is both the arsonist and firefighter.
It is essential to walk through what happened over the last year. In 2016 and early last year, there was no reasonable talk of war. While the United States had not figured out how to get North Korea to stop its nuclear and missile programs, it was effectively relying on a strategy that had worked to prevent war for decades through a combination of deterrence, containment and diplomacy. North Korea had no incentive to attack the United States. If the Kim regime were to attack, it knows it would lose the only thing it prizes, and that is its survival.
North Korea poses a very serious threat to the United States, and it requires a serious strategy. The rapid pace of North Korean missile and nuclear tests last year merited strong responses such as sanctions. But preventive war would be disastrous and counterproductive. Rather than using diplomacy and the array of U.S. tools effectively, Trump decided to begin threatening an unnecessary war with North Korea.
Things obviously got tense. The American people and U.S. allies were rightly concerned. Even Trump’s own advisers appeared alarmed. Then, when Kim offered to start diplomacy with the United States, Trump not only agreed, but immediately gave something North Korea had not even asked for: a meeting with the U.S. president.
It is important to pause here. Trump could have accepted the offer of diplomacy by sending his negotiators to begin talks. But he gave away a massive concession upfront, taking away leverage his negotiators could have used. The North Koreans knew they were getting the summit anyway, so they did not have to give anything up. There was still room to use the summit effectively, as Trump could have remained vague on a timeline and only confirmed it once North Korea made real concessions.
Then the summit happened, and nothing came out of it. There was no explicit promise by North Korea to give up nuclear weapons, no interim steps towards denuclearization, no inspectors. This, by the way, makes clear that cancelling the summit was not a negotiating tactic, and if it was, that is some art of the deal. The United States got less than it did in past agreements with North Korea, all of which had been negotiated by much lower ranking officials than the president.
What did come out of the summit? The United States got North Korea to agree to hold more meetings, which is exactly what they were willing to do when Trump first announced the summit in March. But in Trump’s world, having met Kim and smiled for the cameras, all the problems have now been solved. Despite North Korea still having exactly the same number of nuclear weapons and missiles as the day before the summit, Trump tweeted, “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.” It seems like his plane must have been rerouted to fantasyland.
After beating the drum of what would be a catastrophic war, Trump is now trying to lower the bar to the floor and convince people that just engaging in diplomacy equates with having saved the world from nuclear annihilation. As Mira Rapp Hooper noted, this is nuclear gaslighting, plain and simple. We can all be thankful that we are not at war with North Korea. But Trump deserves none of that credit because a preventive war with North Korea is not a remotely responsible policy option that any president should consider when dealing with the Kim regime.
Why can we not just be happy that we are now engaged in diplomacy? Is it not the right thing to do? We should absolutely welcome diplomacy. It is the only way we can hope to deal with North Korea. But to be effective, diplomacy must be done right. If Trump is able to continue setting the terms of the debate on North Korea, then the United States may be willing to accept a very bad deal just because it is not nuclear war.
There is still an opportunity to pursue a good deal. Trump should empower our diplomats to negotiate with North Korea, coordinate strategies with South Korea and Japan, and strengthen allied deterrence capabilities. Instead, Trump is now laying the groundwork for selling a very bad deal if need be. The United States must keep its eye on the ball by protecting our national security. The president creating a crisis with North Korea so he can appear to solve that crisis does not count as progress. It is playing games with the lives of the American people.
