The Daily - What Iran Is Learning From North Korea

Episode Date: July 2, 2019

President Trump made history over the weekend when he became the first sitting American president to step into North Korea. But the biggest impact of that gesture may have been on Iran. Guest: David E. Sanger, a national security correspondent for The New York Times and the author of “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age.” For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: Trump administration officials are at odds over what demands to make in new talks with North Korea, with some now considering a nuclear freeze as a first step.Iran on Monday violated a key element of the 2015 nuclear deal, from which Mr. Trump withdrew the United States last year.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, President Trump made history over the weekend when he became the first sitting U.S. president to step into North Korea. David Sanger on why the biggest impact of that gesture may have actually been on Iran. It's Tuesday, July 2nd.

David, I want to start with North Korea. Remind me what led to this historic meeting over the weekend. with North Korea. Remind me what led to this historic meeting over the weekend. Well, Michael, it really goes back to President Trump's transition meeting with President Obama, who said to him, you know, North Korea is going to be

your single most dangerous problem. And it turned out that was right, because by the summer of 2017... Now, the latest show of defiance from North Korea's tyrant, Kim Jong-un, and his murderous regime. When Mr. Trump was just months into office, the North Koreans were conducting ever more powerful missile tests. The Pentagon now confirms North Korea just a few hours ago launched yet another intercontinental ballistic missile, the second this month.

They were within a hair's breadth of being able to reach the United States. Primarily designed to deliver nuclear weapons. Many feared that they were near to being able to mount a nuclear weapon on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile. North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. And the president was threatening fire and fury if the North Koreans didn't surrender

their entire program. Yet despite every crime you have committed against God and man, you are ready to offer. And we will do that, we will offer a path to a much better future. It begins with an end to the aggression of your regime. And that's when the president was saying that his only goal here was complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization. Denuclearization. That all shifted come the winter between 2017 and 2018, and the North Koreans made a first overture toward having a summit,

and the president leapt at the idea. And in Singapore in June of 2018... We're very proud of what took place today. I think our whole relationship with North Korea and the Korean Peninsula is going to be a very much different situation than it has in the past. For the first time, an American president met with a North Korean leader. And we have developed a very special bond. So people are going to be very impressed.

People are going to be very happy. And we're going to take care of a very big and very dangerous problem for the world. And as the president said later, we fell in love. Right. What came out of that? And as the president said later, we fell in love. Right. What came out of that? A vaguely worded statement committing both sides to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,

a phrase that sounds simple but which both sides interpret very differently. And then a lot of talk about how within a year there would be substantial progress. And, of course, there wasn't any, which led the president and chairman Kim to meet again in February in Hanoi, in Vietnam, for what was supposed to be the summit that would implement all of this. That summit broke down before they could ever actually reach an agreement. And it broke down because Kim Jong-un basically offered up a swap that the United States would lift the most onerous sanctions on North Korea. And in return, the U.S. would simply get the dismantlement of a major nuclear area, but they wouldn't get the existing weapons, they wouldn't get the existing missiles, and they wouldn't even get a complete nuclear freeze. We had some options, and at this time we decided not to do any of the options. And we'll see where that goes. But it was a very interesting two days. And I think,

actually, it was a very productive two days. But sometimes you have to walk. So it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough. That's why the president felt that it was time to get together again. So at the G20 meeting in Osaka, he naturally reaches for his first weapon of diplomacy, his cell phone, and he tweets out an invitation to Kim Jong-un. Hey, I'm going to be in your neighborhood. We're going up to the DMZ. The DMZ being the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Yes, it's the famed no man's land, very heavily mined. And the president said, why don't you come down and meet me just to say hello.

So it was an impromptu invitation by the president via Twitter saying, I'm going to be in South Korea. I'm going to be near the border. Come meet me. Yes, and it's exactly what most diplomats would tell you you should never do. Never have an unstructured meeting with no real agenda and all that. And, of course, President Trump's view is quite different. It's, well, let's just all see if we can get along because it's the relationship in his mind that is as important as the nuclear capability that North Korea has. So after the president sends this invitation tweet, what happens?

Within a few hours, the North Koreans had responded and they quickly put together this impromptu meeting. So the president flies as scheduled from Japan to South Korea, helicopters up toward the DMZ, and who drives down from Pyongyang? But of course, Kim Jong-un, who then steps out. And there they are for a moment or two, each on the other side of the line. Good to see you again. I've never expected to meet you at this place. That's good. It's my honor. They shake hands. There's a little bit of an awkward back and forth.

Would you like me to step forward? The translator basically says... I'm okay with that. You will be the first U.S. president to cross the border. And if you step into North Korean territory, sir, you'll be the first American president, and Trump, of course, seizing the moment. I'd be very proud to do that.

Okay, let's do it. Come on. President Trump has just walked across the demarcation line that made him the first U.S. president to visit our country. He steps over and he spends about a minute in North Korea, which isn't much, but it's a minute more than any of his predecessors have spent since North Korea was created. Stepping across that line was a great honor. A lot of progress has been made. A lot of progress has been made.

A lot of friendships have been made. And this has been, in particular, a great friendship. So I just want to thank you. That was very quick notice, and I want to thank you. So, David, what exactly was President Trump expecting in return for this historic gesture of stepping into North Korea and shaking hands with this dictator at this stage of the U.S. relationship with North Korea, given that North Korea hasn't delivered at all, really,

on the nuclear front? I think the only thing he hoped and expected was that this would be the moment to get negotiations, which have been stalemated, started again. And the only thing he got in return was a promise that American negotiators and North Korean negotiators would meet sometime in a few weeks. But even before the president sent that tweeted invitation to Kim, my reporting had shown that inside the administration, there was a growing awareness that the only way they were going to break the stalemate was to try to get the North Koreans to agree to a nuclear freeze. That is, to stop making new nuclear material so that the problem isn't getting worse while the president is trying to negotiate his long-run objective, which is full denuclearization. So just to be clear, a freeze is simply locking in the current North Korean nuclear situation.

That's right. Now, that may be all that Kim Jong-un wants, because when Kim Jong-un looks around the world, he sees countries where the United States previously demanded that we would never tolerate them having nuclear weapons. And we've tolerated it in Pakistan. We've tolerated it with India. We don't talk about it, but we've tolerated it with Israel. Right. And so the North Koreans have basically taken the position, if they could get away with it, why can't we? And so far, there's been not that much evidence from the Trump administration that they can't get away with it.

That's right. The North Koreans, the president will say, have not conducted a nuclear test since the winter of 2017. And he's right about that. They have not conducted an intercontinental ballistic missile test. about that. They have not conducted an intercontinental ballistic missile test. And that's what we were worried about because those are the missiles that could reach L.A. or Chicago or maybe one day New York and Washington. But that doesn't mean their nuclear program has stopped. So, David, from everything you're saying, North Korea has not given up its nuclear weapons or really indicated that it ever will. And yet, it continues to receive President Trump's attention. So what's the lesson here? Well, one of the big lessons is it pays to have nuclear

weapons. There may be only nine countries right now in the world that have them. But if you're Chairman Kim running a small, broke country, nuclear weapons offer enormous leverage. And you can get a lot from the United States without giving up any of them. Kim has gone a long, long way just on the fact that he's got an arsenal of 20 to 60 weapons. And other countries are watching that. And no one's watching it more closely than the Iranians. We'll be right back. So, David, let's turn to Iran.

Where does its nuclear program stand at the moment? Well, this is in many ways, Michael, the opposite story of North Korea. Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not, a comprehensive long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. President Obama focused on Iran and sort of ignored the North Koreans, and he ended up getting a deal in 2015 that didn't quite freeze all nuclear production, but it did get the Iranians to ship 97 percent of their nuclear fuel out of the country. Because of this deal,

that stockpile will be reduced to a fraction of what would be required for a single weapon. So big progress towards denuclearization. Well, Iran didn't even have nuclear weapons. So the idea here was try to keep them in a position where they would always be at least a year away from being able to produce enough fuel to make a weapon. And then it would take more time beyond that to actually engineer the weapon itself. Right. My fellow Americans, today I want to update the world on our efforts to prevent Iran from

acquiring a nuclear weapon. So then President Trump takes office. He overrules his own advisers, and he rips the entire thing up in May of 2018, and he starts reimposing sanctions. Powerful sanctions will go into full effect. Now, amazingly, for a year, the Iranians still keep in compliance.

They don't make more nuclear material. They don't enrich beyond their limits. And the reason is that the Europeans are promising them that they'll make up for the American sanctions. They'll come up with a barter system of some kind that will give Iran the revenue that they're losing because the United States is imposing these sanctions around the world. But they can't do it. They simply can't put together a system that could make up for that lost oil revenue. And as the pressure builds on Iran, as every new round of sanctions brings their oil revenue down, round of sanctions, brings their oil revenue down, and as inflation takes off in Iran,

the political pressure to break out of the deal becomes overwhelming. Iran's president says time is running out for European leaders to save the 2015 nuclear deal. And then, of course, two oil tankers have been ambushed in the Gulf of Oman. We had all the events in the Gulf in the past few weeks. An American drone was shot down in international airspace by an Iranian missile over the Strait of Hormuz. And the president of Iran had said, that's it. If President Trump isn't going to comply with this deal, if the Europeans can't make us whole, we're not staying inside. And he announces a strategy where bit by bit they're going to break out of different elements. The International Atomic Energy Agency has just confirmed Iran has now gone over the limit of its uranium stockpiles.

On Monday, they broke out of the first one. And the international nuclear inspectors confirmed that they had produced more fuel, more than 300 kilograms, than they are allowed to stockpile at any one time. And then the foreign minister of Iran, Javad Zarif, the man who negotiated with then Secretary of State John Kerry to put the deal together initially. He said, well, you know, soon we're going to take the next step and we're going to begin to raise the level of enrichment. Well, to the rest of the world, that means they're going to get closer to bomb-grade fuel instead of just being restricted to the kind of fuel you would use in a nuclear reactor. use in a nuclear reactor. So Iran is taking the steps that could theoretically allow them to eventually develop a nuclear weapon. That's right. But it's also possible, Michael, that what they really want, at least in the short term, is just some leverage. They keep sending every signal

that they don't want to do this, but that President Trump is forcing them to do it, and that the Europeans, by failing to compensate them, are leaving them with no other choice but to get out of the agreement themselves. David, I want to talk about this notion of leverage, because you said that Iran is watching the U.S. approach to North Korea more closely than perhaps any other country. And they no doubt witnessed President Trump walking across the border into North Korea to meet Kim Jong-un, despite Kim not really offering up much in return, because North Korea has these nuclear weapons. So what will Iran take from that moment?

Well, if you're Iranian, you look at this and you say, we tried the experiment of giving up most of our program. And the Americans just turned around and reimposed sanctions anyway and tried to crush us. So now there's a big faction in Iran that is saying, let's go the other way. Let's do what the North Koreans did. Let's build up a program. And if we need to, we can always move on to building nuclear weapons. They won't admit that in public. But you hear this debate emanating from Iran all the time. And certainly, there's nothing in their recent experience that would lead them to conclude that giving up their program left them with much leverage against a president who decided to reimpose sanctions. Right.

In fact, it would be the opposite. The closer they get to a nuclear program, the closer they would get to being empowered in a way that would force the U.S. to deal with them. That's right. They may not even need to go all the way toward building a weapon, but they do need to show that they've got the component parts and could build it if they're going to get the world to come around and lift the sanctions. David, if the United States has set up a dynamic

where Iran feels it should replicate North Korea, but we don't want that, we don't want Iran to behave as North Korea has when it comes to a nuclear weapons program, what do we do? Well, Michael, that depends on what the administration's real objective is. And on this, they are extremely hard to pin down. One possibility is that these sanctions are designed, as the administration often says, to force the Iranians into a negotiation. In other words, to negotiate a better deal than President Obama did. A new nuclear deal. A new nuclear deal, just as the president has forced Mexico and Canada to renegotiate NAFTA, just as he's forcing the Chinese to renegotiate trade agreements,

that this pressure alone will force the Iranians to reopen negotiations. The problem is there's no sign that's working. The second possibility is that the Iranians will speed toward a weapons program and the U.S. will run out of other options, that the sanctions won't work, that further covert action like cyber attacks won't work, and that we'll end up in some kind of a military conflict to set back their nuclear program. And that's the big fear you hear in Congress these days, not only among Democrats, but even among some Republicans, that the president has not yet defined his objectives well enough that he's going to be able to avoid getting into a military conflict. Now, what's tainting this whole debate

is that there are some in the Trump administration who believe you're not going to solve the nuclear problem until you solve the problem of the Iranian regime. That until there's real regime change, until the regime itself collapses, a younger generation that's not terribly interested in nuclear weapons takes over, this problem will just get worse and worse and worse. And if you ask the Europeans, when they're not being quoted on the record, they will tell you they believe that's what the Trump administration is trying to do here, that they're not merely trying to stop the nuclear program, but they're actually trying to crack the regime. So in the end, it's not really about nuclear weapons in Iran,

whereas it may very much really be about nuclear weapons in North Korea. And that may help explain what's going on here. It's not only about nuclear weapons in Iran, whereas I think what's striking about the Trump administration is there's no talk about regime change in North Korea. They don't see any other faction that's going to take over. They don't see an uprising by the people. They're willing to go work with the Kim family,

even if they're murderers, even if they're despots, because we're stuck with them. family, even if they're murderers, even if they're despots. Because we're stuck with them. We're stuck with them, and they believe the president can work with Kim Jong-un. The president himself is convinced that his deal-making capability will mean that he will reduce the threat, even if he doesn't get rid of all the weapons. David, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Always great to be with you, Michael. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know. On Monday, protests in Hong Kong turned violent as a large group of demonstrators broke into the city's legislative chambers, smashed glass walls, spray-painted the interior, and occupied the building for hours. The break-in revealed divisions within the protest movement, which began as an act of rebellion against a proposed extradition law that could subject Hong Kong's residents to China's legal system, but has since evolved into a broader rejection of Chinese rule over the entire city.

The vast majority of protesters remained peaceful, with many denouncing those who broke into the legislature for undermining their cause. And... We came today and we saw that the system is still broken and that people's human rights are still being abused. More than a dozen Democratic members of Congress visited border patrol stations in El Paso and Clint, Texas on Monday

to investigate for themselves the reportedly poor conditions in which migrants are being housed. And they put them in a room with no running water. Among the lawmakers was Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who said she was told by one woman in the El Paso station that a Border Patrol officer had instructed her to drink water from a toilet. These women were being told by CBP officers to drink out of the toilet. They were drinking water out of the toilet.

And that was them knowing a congressional visit was coming. This is CBP on their best behavior, telling people to drink out of the toilet. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.