The leaders of both Koreas grasped a reality that eluded Washington's pundits: that Donald Trump was their best chance of disarming a skeptical American foreign policy elite. In gaining Trump's support, the two Koreas have indeed, however paradoxically, neutralized the United States as an actor in the drama of inter-Korean relations.
Confronting the Impossible
Think of the story of the two Koreas as a parable of two "impossibles."
The first impossible is denuclearization. Now that North Korea has a nuclear weapons program, it's difficult to imagine that it will surrender such weaponry. After all, given the relative decline of its conventional forces, nukes provide a genuine insurance policy against any outside effort at regime change. They're also the main reason the United States pays any attention to the country. Without nuclear weapons, North Korea would become as vulnerable as Iraq was in 2003 and as irrelevant as Laos after 1975. Nuclear weapons are Pyongyang's ticket to international respect. Why on Earth would Kim Jong-un give them up in exchange for a non-aggression "guarantee" from the United States, a pledge that a subsequent administration might simply tear up (just as Trump recently shredded Obama's nuclear deal with Iran)?
The second impossible is reunification. The Koreas are about as far apart as two countries coexisting in the same century could be, as economically disparate as Germany and Ghana, as politically different as Athens and Sparta. One country is thoroughly connected to the world community; the other maintains an isolation policy comparable to eighteenth-century Japan's. Like matter and anti-matter, the two Koreas risk catastrophe if suddenly brought together.
There are three imaginable ways of dealing with these two impossibles. The first, of course, is the regime-change approach of National Security Advisor John Bolton and his fan club. The idea would be to accelerate the demise of Kim's regime either indirectly through covert means or even directly through war. In the wake of a North Korean collapse, according to this crackpot scenario, the U.S. Army would sweep into that country, gathering up the loose nukes, while South Korea absorbed the north just as West Germany swallowed East Germany in 1990. No one with an ounce of sense, from academics to Pentagon officials, considers this a viable approach, given the heightened risk of a war with mass casualties, possibly tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, and the potential use of some of the North's nukes in South Korea and beyond. And that's not even taking into consideration the South's unwillingness to contemplate the immense costs of an overnight reunification.
Despite Trump's embrace of a summit with Kim Jong-un, Bolton hasn't given up on this regime-change approach. He initially sought to load the summit agenda with enough non-nuclear issues (missiles, abductions of Japanese and South Koreans) to make it unwieldy and bound to fail. More critically, he insisted that the "Libya" model would serve as the example the United States would follow with North Korea -- an ominous signal, given that the regime of Muammar Gaddafi collapsed under the pressure of a U.S.-NATO intervention several years after it gave up its nuclear program. In explaining why North Korea might cancel the summit with Trump, a government spokesman singled out Bolton and his Libya references. And in truth, the North Korean reaction was not a "tantrum," as the Washington Post editorialized, but a reasonable objection to Bolton's tactics.
The second approach, the default position for several decades, has been to wait for North Korea to "come to its senses" and beg for an agreement with the United States. Tighter sanctions and an inflexible negotiating position, the adherents of this theory believe, will eventually inflict so much pain on the North that, sooner or later, even the autocratic leadership of Pyongyang will realize its people can't eat nukes and trade them in for a ticket to the global economy. However attractive this strategy may look, it obviously hasn't worked over many years. Here, Trump's critique of the Obama administration has for once been accurate.
The third approach, slow-motion reunification, finally seems to be emerging as the plan of choice for both Koreas. It treats each of the impossibles as resolvable over time.
Moon Jae-in adopted this approach to reunification from his mentor, former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung. Cooperative economic projects are to be designed to gradually bridge the income gap between the two countries. Negotiations over a rail link and fishing rights in adjoining waters are meant to begin the process of harmonizing the political approaches of the two countries. According to a plan Moon delivered to Kim via USB drive at the April summit, South Korea would help its northern neighbor enter the global community by degrees so that, like a diver surfacing from a great depth, it wouldn't suffer the bends.
Denuclearization is equally tricky. But a slow-motion process might also square the circle. If North Korea and the United States agree to a staged reduction of the North's nuclear weapons in exchange for a gradually increasing set of incentives, Kim Jong-un could potentially have his nukes (for a while) and give them up as well (eventually).
Although the elimination of nuclear weapons may be the ultimate goal -- for North Korea as well as all other nuclear states -- denuclearization as such could prove a distraction in the medium term. After all, Kim Jong-un could decide to reverse such a commitment or continue to pursue the objective secretly. So the goal should really be to ensure that North Korea doesn't want to use those weapons -- or any other weapons -- because to do so would jeopardize its newfound position in the global economy. That was the U.S. strategy toward China in the 1970s after it, too, had become a nuclear power and it worked without either denuclearization or regime change.
In other words, the worst position Trump could take in Singapore would be to demand that North Korea completely and immediately abandon its nuclear weaponry before it receives any benefits from a reduction in global economic sanctions. By contrast, a more gradual timeline for denuclearization could well dovetail with slow-motion reunification. What many Korea watchers insist is a fatal flaw in the Trump-Kim summit -- a completely different understanding of what denuclearization entails -- might turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Such strategic ambiguity could allow both sides to make interim compromises and embrace an interim reduction in tensions even though they were incapable of really agreeing on the end game.
Which brings us back to all the skepticism surrounding the upcoming summit. Sure, it might end up more show than substance, but that would be fine. What the two Koreas really need is the equivalent of a papal benediction from Trump. Let the American president claim the credit, all of it, for processes of denuclearization and reunification meant to intersect at some distant horizon. Let him preen about his contributions to world peace (while he ratchets up war tensions against Iran). Let his fans chant and his Republican backers in Congress nominate him for a Nobel Prize. Let him cling to his misconceptions about North Korea, nukes, and the nature of geopolitics.
And then let him get out of the way so that the Koreans can do the real work, the historic work, the breakthrough work, of knitting the peninsula back together.
John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands (a Dispatch Books original) and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book is Aftershock: A Journey into Eastern Europe's Broken Dreams.
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