Kim’s Case of Cold Feet Offers an Opportunity <br>To Ditch the Talks

Opportunity knocks, I say. Kim Jong-un’s sudden case of cold feet — North Korea’s warning that it may pull out of the Singapore Summit — could be the best outcome of this whole bizarre business.That’s because with each passing week it has become clearer that President Trump is eyeing a deal that would leave in place the North Korean Communist regime. And Kim himself in power.What’s the point of that?It certainly is a contrast with the way, say, the division of Germany came to an end. In that case, the free West German republic absorbed its collapsed East German enemy.And indicted its dictator — Erich Honecker — for ordering Communist guards to shoot East Germans trying to escape over the Berlin Wall. Honecker died of cancer during the trial.This doesn’t seem to be what Mr. Trump has in mind for North Korea’s “rocket man,” though Honecker’s crimes pale in comparison to Mr. Kim’s. So Mr. Kim is the one with the most to gain from the current course of negotiations.And Secretary of State Pompeo isn’t exactly hiding that fact. Mr. Pompeo’s interview with “Fox News Sunday” left no doubt that the administration is prepared to leave the Communists in power if they abandon nukes.“Are we in effect saying to Kim, if you give us what we want, you can stay on in power?” Chris Wallace asked the secretary. Mr. Pompeo seemed to take that for granted.“We will have to provide security assurances to be sure,” Mr. Pompeo responded. The secretary suggested that such a “trade-off” has been “pending for 25 years.”That depends on what one means by “pending.” It’s true that guarantees had been sought by Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, and his grandfather, Kim Il-sung.Our side, though, has reacted gingerly. President Clinton’s ex-defense secretary, William Perry, went to Pyongyang and tried to sweet talk the reds out of their nuclear program. He talked about what one online account refers to as “some form of security guarantee.” In 2003, President George W. Bush tried to jump-start progress by vowing not to attack the North.But what, exactly, does that even mean — and is it realistic?Mr. Bush offered a written, multilateral agreement to back up his word but nixed a formal nonaggression pact. Brookings Institution scholar Richard C. Bush at the time suggested there was only one way to reassure the North.That would be “a treaty binding this and future administrations to keep North Korea out of US crosshairs.” But “no Republican-controlled Senate would ratify a treaty along the lines proposed by North Korea.”The Trump administration could attempt to follow the lead of its predecessor and dash off some kind of agreement akin to the Iran nuclear deal, which was a treaty in all but name. Do Messrs. Trump and Pompeo, though, really want to be courting North Korea into the same kind of unratified undertaking to which President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry agreed with Iran?“No president,” Mr. Pompeo told Fox, “has ever put America in a position where the North Korean leadership thought that this was truly possible, that the Americans would actually do this.”By “this,” Mr. Pompeo meant: “would lead to the place where America was no longer held at risk by the North Korean regime.” He said he’s convinced Mr. Kim shares that objective.Yet Mr. Pompeo had barely spoken when up piped North Korea’s “first vice foreign minister” to warn that if America “is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment,” it would reconsider the summit.This is being interpreted in Washington as an attempt by North Korea to drive a wedge between Mr. Pompeo and President Trump’s hardline National Security Adviser, John Bolton.It seems Mr. Bolton unnerved the North Koreans by raising the example of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi. Under pressure from the Bush administration, the colonel gave up his rogue state’s nuclear arms in 2003. Yet that didn’t save him when the Arab Spring rolled into Libya. He was deposed and executed in 2011.My own view is that Messrs. Pompeo and Bolton make an ideal team at good-cop, bad-cop. That the North expressed a feeling of “repugnance” against Mr. Bolton means Mr. Bolton is doing his job.Meantime, the White House spokesman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, says America would be ready if Comrade Kim wants to meet but if he doesn’t, “that’s OK, too.”We should be so lucky.This column first appeared in the New York Post.

Kim’s Case of Cold Feet Offers an Opportunity <br>To Ditch the Talks

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