What Trump-Kim summit is all about

| | in Oped

The US Press Secretary recently declared in a true cowboyish manner that all pressures and stress on North Korea would continue. This demarche might be construed by some as a negative and discouraging move which might derail the artifice of the Donald Trump-Kim Jong-Un negotiations. It’s akin to CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act) which is being incorrectly billed as being the bête noire for India’s Defence trade with the United States of America. Still, it is like a clarion call to deter adversaries such as Russia. The declaration of the American Press Secretary comes as no surprise as certain pre-conditions come attached with the “Bombast Diplomacy” with North Korean and the Communist dictatorship.

The American pre-conditions might act as a dampener on the talks with North Korea scheduled for June 12, 2018. The observers of cultural studies can refer to the Korean peninsular quagmire as a “zombie conflict man” at large which needs to be either exterminated or exorcised of all evil and satanic impact on North Korea. The need of the hour for the internationalist segment is that cooperative veneer must prevail so that more than a meaty ice-breaking can be attained in the way forward to a Korean denuclearisation. President Trump and his negotiating folk expect and have aired their conditionality that North Korea must open its nuclear sites to IAEA verification and monitoring mechanisms, the same on Iran’s Natanz and Arak. This is the first instance since the Korean war in the fifties that a sitting American President will be having a rendezvous with his North Korean counterpart, who till recently was basking in the prospects of “nuking and gutting” the American homeland. It was no other than Kim Jong Un, who raced in his zebra colored special train and the Chinese Ilyushin aircraft, which is dubbed as “Air force-Un”, in order to seek an iota of guarantee about American intent in the Korean Peninsula.

The quintessential West Asian experts have always wondered why the United States under the President Bush administration militarily intervened into Iraq during the Saddam Hussein rule, but the same military solution was not applied in the staid North Korean regime. Why the discrepancy? The “Foggy Bottom” goes ahead with bias in the American role as a regulator, still the North Korean dictator has agreed to a “standstill cooling off phase”. Both the leaders have chosen to give peace a chance in the Korean Peninsula, but it is an uphill task. Who can forget the military blitz across the Yalu river and the decision of General Douglas to go the whole hog during the Korean war in the fiendish fifties.

Korea has sustained partition in 1995 with great consequences. The 1950-53 Korean war ended in a ceasefire, but the intermittent stress on the besieged peninsula has persisted since the flotsam of the fifties in the international politics as an aftermath of World War II. What is being attempted now is the development of a disarmament regime in the piqued peninsula, which the North Korean Communist satrap paraded out with style in 2003 as Pyongyang repudiated the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Fredrick L Kirgis wrote in the American Society of International Law journal, “In 1992, North Korea entered into its Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA under Article III of the NPT. The Safeguards Agreement provides for measurements and observations of North Korean nuclear materials and facilities by IAEA inspectors. Article 26 of the Safeguards Agreement provides, ‘This Agreement shall remain in force as long as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is party to the Treaty (the NPT).’ Consequently, if North Korea has validly withdrawn from the NPT pursuant to its January 2003 announcement, the Safeguards Agreement would no longer be in force.”

However, there is much difference between repudiating IAEA, which the North Korean Communist state did in 1994, and the final withdrawing from the NPT. But, as, the stipulations in the NPT portend, the parties to the treaty can move out of the international agreement dependent upon international circumstances and conditionality of a changed international system. The NPT does not operate with a mechanism that if circumstances alter Korea’s supreme interests than the aggrieved nation can move out of the treaty. The same stipulation runs in accordance with Customary International Law.

KCNA reported in 2003, “(Your) country's purpose for entering the NPT lay in removing the US nuclear threat and importantly, in smoothly resolving the country's energy issue with nuclear power. We have actively encouraged hydroelectric and thermoelectric generation capabilities to meet the increasing energy demand in the people's economy. However, this was limited in its potential power. Accordingly, we decided to develop the nuclear power industry.”

Thus, the North Koreans were ingenious and creative enough in spawning a kind of ruse to manoeuver out of the international law. The utility of nuclear energy in the pursuit of power generation was primarily engineered and tom-tommed as a cause célèbre for eschewing the treaty. Thus, a nascent nuclear disarmament regime was nipped in the bud by Kim Jong Il with the traditionally oriental excuses of being singular sided and discriminating in its inception and nature.

What needs to be astutely understood is that the Peacenik Regime ought to be given an apt opportunity in the peninsula. Bombast, rhetoric, loud talk and vitriolic verbiage ought not to be relegated to the backburner as a mere poser-bluster. The heated exchange of words are part of the tradition of “Powder Keg Diplomacy” which forewords a crisis only to be mellowed down by sane and traditionally supine agreement. This is the ideal manner in which the script might play out despite expected posturing. In the face of a non-solution and a failure of summitry between Washington and Pyongyang, the region and the world might be readying to traverse smoothly from one disaster to another. These issues are part of a “larger forecast-narrative” which nearly all observers of international relations see. Instead of looking at the nuclear deadlock as a stereotypically and stylistically tom-tommed blackmail by the United States, the North Korean standpoint needs to be understood. The North Korean stance is all slated to be marketed by the Kim’s regime as the standard stance of Pyongyang has been to negotiate the intake of atomic power plants, food and other goods from their own bête noire, the US. Thus, it might be cannily executed by a loud but efficient American President but the Korean right to bargain shamefacedly for the American goodies and “give-aways” places its own takeaways in a shoddy and shaky terrain.  

(The writer teaches International Relations at Indian Institute of Public Administration, Delhi)