Today, Explained - How do you solve a problem like Korea?

Episode Date: June 12, 2018

Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un made history today. Or did they? NPR’s Elise Hu was there. She explains what happened and what didn’t. Plus, The New Yorker’s Robin Wright recounts United States summit history. She says there are two keys to a successful summit, and Singapore's meeting lacked both. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Yeah. We have that too. Elise Hugh, solo bureau Chief for NPR. The Singapore summit actually happened. You were there. Yeah, it happened. I mean, obviously we had some back and forth. The optics of it included a lot of flags, a lot of alternating U.S. and North Korean flags.

The two leaders walked out in front of those flags from opposite sides of a corridor and then met in the middle in front of the flag backdrop and shook hands. They held that handshake for about 13 seconds and then they turned to the cameras and then walked together to a corridor to begin a one-on-one meeting that lasted for about 45 minutes

with only the two leaders plus their interpreters. And then that expanded. One of those face-to-face meetings with the North Koreans on one side and the U.S. delegation on the other side. Working together, we will get it taken care of. The U.S. delegation had Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Trump's one side, an interpreter on Trump's other side, and then Chief of Staff John Kelly on one end, and National Security Advisor John Bolton on the other end. At the end of the

summit, the two leaders sat down next to one another and signed a joint agreement. The agreement's only a page and a half long, very short on specifics, but has some top line pledges that North Korea signed onto with the U.S. president. Okay, so I saw the statement, I saw their signatures, but what exactly did they agree to? What is in there? What's the content? It's a four-part agreement. The first part committed the U.S. and North Korea to a new relationship. It pledged to sort of end the hostile relationship that has lasted for many decades now. You know, obviously there have been periods of engagement and then periods of hostility. But the two leaders pledged to try and start the road to improving what's been a very difficult and dangerous relationship.

The second was that they would join together in working toward a stable peace regime. And when we hear peace regime, what that means is a commitment to try and end the Korean War, which ended in 1953 and only in armistice. This is something that would require China to be involved in. But this agreement regime has pledged to regarding its nuclear program, only to then flout its agreements by continuing to test and advance its program. And then finally, the fourth part is a goodwill gesture. It commits to the repatriation of the remains of the war dead from the Korean War, which killed tens of thousands of Americans and three million Koreans. So that's part

four. So if the biggest part of this four-point plan for the United States, at least, is this denuclearization, what exactly does that mean? I mean, it sounds like it just means get rid of all of your nukes, but obviously that's more complicated than it sounds. So the U.S. under the George W. Bush administration and following through the eight years of the Obama administration, and now even under the Trump administration, has said its position is CVID, which is government speak and an acronym that stands for complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of nuclear arms. CVID remains the ultimate goal of the Trump administration, but previous administrations considered CVID something they wanted to see swiftly.

And the concession out of the US administration now is that it's willing to take steps toward denuclearization and see this happen in a phased way. President Trump said, hey, you know, scientifically, I've been watching and reading a lot about this. And it does take a long time to, you know, pull off complete denuclearization. It takes a long time. That's a shift from previous U.S. position on what denuclearization looks like. If so much of this has been sort of tried and failed by previous administrations, what's different this time? Dennis Rodman showed up?

Well, Dennis Rodman has showed up to talk with Kim Jong-un, obviously, before, too. But what's different this time is Kim Jong-un as a leader is different. He's very, very different from his rather reclusive and introverted father, Kim Jong-il. You know, Kim Jong-il had never really spoken in public. His voice hadn't been heard because he was really only seen in still images and B-roll video. So tape of him would come out and be on North Korean state media, but not his voice. Kim Jong-un is the opposite. He has pivoted to a statesman-like role in 2018. We've seen him now in the past two months not only meet with South Korea, their sworn enemy, the leader of South Korea, twice in person. He's also gone to China twice now to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

And now has had this big summit that North Korea has always wanted with the leader of the richest, most powerful nation on the planet, the United States. And this has all happened just in the last two months. That's what's different, and that's what could portend a different result. Kim Jong-un got to stand next to the president of the United States. What did President Trump get out of this? Trump made the news when he gave a sprawling, hour-long press conference, only the second full press conference of his presidency he gave today after the summit.

And during that press conference, he decided to make some news. North Korea, in committing to denuclearization, got from the U.S. in return a security guarantee. So an end to the sort of hostility, but also a guarantee that it wouldn't need a nuclear deterrent. And what that looks like, according to what Trump says,

is going to be a suspension of the military exercises, the joint military exercises that have gone on for decades on the Korean Peninsula between South Korea and the United States. They happen annually in March and in August. We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money. Trump, in an about face, decided to take the North Korean line. Plus, I think it's very provocative. The U.S. is conceding things, and it's conceding something that I really didn't expect it to,

and a lot of observers didn't expect it to, these war games, what the president calls, that have been defensive in posture, according to the Pentagon. So the president is going against not just his administration, but many previous administrations that, listen, we just maintain this for a defensive posture. And it's something that we totally have a right to do as, you know, sovereign countries. It sounds like the United States has more to lose here because it's giving up more. Is that the case? Yes. At first glance, it sounds like the U.S. is unnecessarily conceding concrete things, where North Korea basically signed on to some diplomatic platitudes. There is going to be a lot of criticism of this agreement in that the U.S. didn't actually secure any practical concessions from North Korea when

it had an opportunity to because these leaders were face to face. It's nice to see these photos of all the flags and this handshake, but did human rights abuses come up? I mean, we have to remember that this is Kim Jong-un and he's a brutal dictator, right? Yes, he is a despot who heads what's considered the most repressive regime on the planet. We cannot forget that North Koreans have no freedom of movement, no freedom of religion, no freedom of speech, no access to outside information. Human rights groups have considered, have called North Korea an open prison. They still maintain prison camps, political prison camps that have been compared

to concentration camps. So human rights groups had really been pushing that the United States bring up these issues. President Trump said, we did discuss it today pretty strongly. They did not spend much time on it compared to the denuclearization issues. And we'll be doing something on it. It's rough. It's rough in a lot of places, by the way. Not just there, but it's rough. He did bring it up, but he couldn't do that much about it right now.

That's curious. I thought that's what summits were for. Did President Trump miss an opportunity to get some major concessions? Well, North Korea certainly got a lot out of this. Not only did it secure policy changes from the United States, it also got a rhetorical change from the president actually calling Pentagon exercises provocative and then hoping to draw down U.S. troops on the South Korean peninsula, which is something that the U.S. actually wanted to have to maintain a footprint in East Asia.

This is still better than where we were six, seven months ago when there was talk about a military option and U.S. military families were packing go bags because we were at the nuclear brink. There's a lot to be worked out going forward, but South Korea in general prefers peace to war. Next up on Today Explained, the United States has been having summits for about a century, and they always have these two essential components. This one had neither of them.

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My name is Robin Wright. I'm a joint fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and at the U.S. Institute of Peace. I'm a contributing writer to The New Yorker. It's important to remember that we didn't always do this whole international summit thing, right? When was the first one? Well, the first 26 American presidents never held a summit. The very first summit was during Woodrow Wilson's presidency, when he went to Europe to help negotiate the terms to end the First World War. And this was a very prolonged negotiation that really redefined the map of the world after World War I, redrew borders, redefined alliances, and tried to set up an international organization in the League of Nations to prevent future wars. And that didn't go so well, huh?

Didn't go so well at all. Woodrow Wilson won the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize, and yet the summit for him was a total flop. Congress refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles that Wilson had brokered so laboriously. It led to a period of isolationism that defined foreign policy for the next three presidencies. And the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were so controversial for Germany that there was a tremendous backlash that led to the rise of the Nazi Party. Was that the next time the United States engaged in one of these international get-togethers? Arguably the most important ones, yes. Franklin Roosevelt held three summits with his counterparts from Britain and the Soviet Union. Never before have the major allies been more closely united, not only in their war aims,

but also in their peace aims. And the Yalta summit will be remembered as catastrophic. It was perceived at the time as a great success. It defined Germany's terms for surrender. It again redrew the map of the world. But the United States basically deferred the fate of part of Europe to the Soviet Union. It seeded the Cold War in the divisions that then divided East and Western Europe. We must have been having summits during the Cold War. What were those ones like? One of the most interesting was between John Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 in Vienna, and was an immediate aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The talks go on for two days.

There still appears to be sharp disagreement on Berlin, nuclear testing, and Soviet demands for veto rights in international discussions. Nevertheless, high-level diplomacy has been re-established by the talks. So Kennedy reached out to Khrushchev and suggested that they have a meeting. He didn't really have a formal agenda, and it proved to be arguably the most disastrous summit the United States has ever held. Kennedy came very ill-prepared. He thought the suave Bostonian from a wealthy family could charm the burly Russian communist. And it didn't work out that way. At one point during the two-day summit, they were taking a stroll in the garden and Khrushchev actually wagged his finger at Kennedy. And Kennedy acknowledged afterwards that Khrushchev had savaged him, that it was the

worst moment of his life. The worst moment of his life? That's what he told the media at the time. And it was catastrophic because it empowered Moscow. And within a couple of months, Moscow began building the wall in Berlin. And then a few months later, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis when the Soviet Union deployed missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles off the Florida coast. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability

against the Western Hemisphere. This summit seems to chiefly be about nuclear weapons. Have we had big, important summits about nukes before? Summits have been particularly important in dealing with arms control. And one of the most interesting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev was initially one of the great failures, but it paved the way for a major success. So the one that failed was in 1986 in Reykjavik, Iceland. And the two leaders came to talk about limiting nuclear arms in the world's two superpowers, then a world that was bipolar and divided during the Cold War by these two massively armed nations. And they both wanted to limit nuclear programs. But it collapsed after two days because Ronald Reagan refused to

compromise on his missile defense system, which was known as Star Wars. And there was a sense at the time that it had broken up in failure. And yet what was so amazing about this summit was that the two men walked away from it recognizing that they actually both wanted to limit nuclear arms. And it led to one of the great successes in arms control a year later when the same Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated a deal that eliminated a whole class of weapons, the intermediate intercontinental ballistic missile. And this provided an inkling that there was change coming in the Soviet Union in 1991. The United States and the Soviet Union brokered the START accord. But it also reflected how long it takes to actually produce an agreement. This took two years of negotiation.

But it had been in play in terms of building options, building ideas. That had begun in the 1960s. Looking at all the summits passed, what do we know works and what doesn't work? Well, two things that are really important in producing a successful summit are legwork, the kind of homework, having a common understanding of what you're trying to achieve, and secondly, the personal chemistry. And that's in some ways why the summit between Kennedy and Khrushchev was such a disaster. And why Reagan and Gorbachev worked.

They actually called each other Ron and Mikhail. Though my pronunciation may give you difficulty, the maxim is doveyai no proviyai. Trust, but verify. But the meaning of this... You repeat that at every meeting. Trust but verify. Но значение этого... На каждой встрече вы это повторяете. You repeat that at every meeting. When it comes to President Trump, it's hard to think of anyone who is, in terms of global counterparts, more unlike him than Kim Jong-un. Trump is a newcomer to politics at the age of 70. Kim is half his age. He's been

in power seven years, but his family has ruled in Pyongyang now for seven decades. Trump is the ultimate capitalist, and Kim is an old-time communist. Okay, so the personal chemistry isn't there, but what about the other half, the legwork? What about the work that several previous presidents have invested in North Korea? The previous three presidents, Clinton, Bush, and Obama, all made efforts to deal with North Korea. President Clinton engaged in what was called the Framework Agreement. The Bush administration decided to try something different, and they walked away after North Korea was found to be cheating in 2002.

And that effort collapsed after 2006, when North Korea tested its first nuclear device. It's now tested nuclear weapons several times. It has ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States. So the challenge that President Trump faces is far more serious than any of his three predecessors. Earlier administrations got agreements with North Korea. Everything looked like it was the beginning of the end of various weapons programs. But in the end, they all collapsed when it came to negotiating the details. The challenging element is dismantling the program. Whether President Trump is a one-term or two-term president, it is possible that even with a diplomatic success with North Korea, all of its weapons

might not be dismantled until after he leaves the White House. It's very complicated. It's not just pulling a plug out of a grenade. We're talking about actually dismantling a nuclear program. The weapons as well as the facilities and the equipment that go into it. One of the real experts on the subject, a professor at Stanford who's been to North Korea and seen his program, said it could take 10 to 15 years. Isn't there a chance that these deals no longer have the same meaning after what he's been doing to our existing deals in the past few years?

Well, there are a lot of questions today, given what happened in Quebec about U.S. credibility and ability to even deal with our allies. There's a lot of concern, I think, among foreign policy analysts about how the United States is portrayed. Does it keep its word when it comes to deals? Can U.S. foreign policy goals change so dramatically from one president to another? Or can we stick to our accords? And of course, that plays out not just during this presidency, but of course, what happens with the next? And who wants to engage with us for fear that the next president will undo

whatever President Trump did. Robin Wright is a contributing writer to The New Yorker. I'm Sean Rammestrom. This is Today Explained. Hi, my name is Anna. I'm 15 and from Maryland. And my favorite episode of Today Explained is It's Never Too Late to Understand the War in Syria. And don't forget to follow Today Explained on Twitter at today underscore explained. Bye. Jamal, here we are at the mattress firm. Is it worth seeing the cheapest mattress? Absolutely, yeah.

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