Trump’s Gamble: Bond With North Korea’s Kim Jong-un Will Secure Deal as He Slashes War Games With South

President Trump by ordering the American command in South Korea to scale down ongoing joint military exercises with South Korea is gambling on the future of America’s relations with both Koreas. That view comes through as Trump is believed to be looking for yet another summit with Kim Jong-un while South Korea’s left-leaning President Lee Jae-myung pleads for an opening to dialog with the North.“North Korea’s bargaining hand is a lot stronger in the second Trump administration,” the long-time Korea expert at the American Enterprise Institute, Nicholas Eberstadt, told the Sun. Pyongyang “has backing from the Kremlin, and we can assume is making more from China. North Korea can ask for a high bid – recognition of its nuclear status.”The North Korean leader has so far given no hint of a response to Mr. Trump, with whom he formed an enduring relationship at their initial summit in Singapore eight years and two months ago. On the day of Mr. Trump’s announcement, Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency reported he had been with his wife Ri Sol-ju and daughter Ju-ae at an acrobatic performance marking the 81st anniversary of the Japanese surrender in World War II and “liberation” of all Korea from Japanese rule.Trump, however, responded, “Yeah, he has,” when a reporter asked him at the White House if Mr. Kim had gotten back to him, according to South Korea’s Yonhap News. He called the response “very positive” without elaborating.Not surprisingly, Mr. Kim did not respond to President Lee’s renewed proposal for North-South talks, which he has consistently ignored, but Trump’s move may yet lead to hesitant dialogue between Pyongyang and Washington. “There will be periods of muscle-flexing and opening the door,” Sydney Seiler, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told a CSIS forum. “You have to keep a credible door for dialogue while maintaining a credible deterrent.”A former intelligence officer on North Korea at the National Intelligence Council, Mr. Seiler believes another Trump-Kim summit, like their three meetings in 2018 and 2019, will do little or nothing to get Mr. Kim to abandon or even curtail the North’s nuclear program. “We have laid the groundwork,” he said at a CSIS forum. “Kim Jung has got to respond.” Finally, he predicted, “the two leaders will talk, but they just won’t produce anything.”Mr. Trump’s decision to curtail the exercises, just as they were beginning, came as a shock. Many analysts believed relations between Seoul and Washington, already wobbling amid disagreements between the leftists in Mr. Lee’s government and the conservatives in the White House, are bound to suffer.A former senior American diplomat in Seoul and Tokyo, Evans Revere called Trump’s order “the latest manifestation of his tendency to make risky, even dangerous, unilateral concessions to North Korea as he seeks to create the illusion of progress with Pyongyang.” He noted that Trump, at his initial summit with Mr. Kim in 2018 in Singapore, had “unilaterally suspended U.S.-South Korea joint exercises without consulting his own military commanders or his ROK ally. The reduction in the exercises, Mr. Revere told the Sun, “will reduce U.S.-South Korean military readiness and deterrence, undermine the alliance’s warfighting capability, and encourage North Korea to believe it is making progress in achieving its dual goals of weakening the U.S.-South Korea alliance and gaining U.S. acceptance of its status as a permanent nuclear power.”A former CIA analyst, Bruce Klingner, said the president’s “abrupt action” would “only exacerbate South Korean and other allied concerns of the unreliability of the U.S. as a defense ally.” Trump, he observes, ‘has a greater affinity for pursuing relations with dictators than with maintaining strong relations with America’s critically important allies.”The sense among some long-time observers was that the American-South Korean alliance would endure. “I do not believe that a single leader or his actions can destroy the ROK-U.S. Alliance,” a long-time army officer in Korea, Steve Tharp, told the Sun. “It has survived disagreements “ going back to the era of South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee, who he noted had passionately objected to the terms of the Korean War armistice. The relationship, Mr. Tharp reminded the Sun, had gone through “periods of intense anti-Americanism from the 1980s to the early 2000s.”A former Marine Corps intelligence analyst, Bruce Bechtol, author of numerous books and studies on North Korea’s leadership, believes that Mr. Lee may have led Mr. Trump to order the reduction. Mr. Lee’s “left of center policy has thus far proven to be very lax toward North Korea,” he said. He also took Mr. Lee to task for not having agreed to support Washington against Iran. North Korea, he noted, had provided many of the missiles that Iran has been firing.The Korea chairman at CSIS, Victor Cha, had yet another theory. Mr. Trump “wants to get the headlines off Iran,” he said. “He’s lifting and shifting to something else.” At the CSIS panel, he predicted “The alliance will survive” despite going through “a rough patch.”

Trump’s Gamble: Bond With North Korea’s Kim Jong-un Will Secure Deal as He Slashes War Games With South

Trump’s Gamble: Bond With North Korea’s Kim Jong-un Will Secure Deal as He Slashes War Games With South

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