Despite Trump’s criticisms of Obama’s “rotten” deal with Iran, he’s already following a similar strategy when it comes to North Korea.
The Trump team also has indicated that, like the Iran deal, economic incentives will be at the heart of any agreement with North Korea. The reality, though, is that even getting deal with North Korea that mirrors the one with Iran would be a major accomplishment.
“The Trump administration will be very lucky to get a deal as good the Iran deal with the North Koreans,” DiMaggio said.
Days before President Donald Trump embarked on a North Korea summit meant to solve one nuclear crisis, Iran hinted at another.
The Islamic Republic announced last week that it has expanded its ability to enrich uranium, a key ingredient for nuclear weapons. The move came just weeks after Trump abruptly quit the Barack Obama-era deal that largely dismantled Iran’s nuclear program, and it could be a first step toward an eventual Iranian dash to a nuclear bomb.
Iran probably didn’t time its move to throw a stink bomb into Tuesday’s summit in Singapore between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, experts say. But the news served as a vivid reminder of how the troubled Iran nuclear deal will haunt Trump’s talks with Kim.
The North Koreans are certainly watching.
“In my informal conversations with North Korean officials they have consistently brought up the Iran deal,” said Suzanne DiMaggio of New America, who, like many North Korea analysts, occasionally engages in unofficial discussions with the country’s representatives.
For all of Trump’s criticisms of the 2015 Iran deal, it was one of the most rigorous nonproliferation agreements ever negotiated. By insisting the Iran deal should have been far more comprehensive and longer-lasting, Trump has effectively set a higher – and possibly unattainable – standard for any deal with Kim.
Democrats say Trump’s actions on Iran could undermine him as he seeks a deal with North Korea. “The fact that the U.S. president pulled out of an international agreement, it does affect America’s credibility,” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.). “I don’t want to overstate it, but it doesn’t help.”
Trump aides argue, however, that by scrapping the Iran deal, the president has demonstrated his seriousness about securing a better bargain with Kim.
So far, Kim has shown no sign that Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran agreement makes him less willing to strike a deal of his own with the United States. Nor has North Korea responded to Trump’s vow, in remarks to reporters Thursday, that he is “totally prepared to walk away” from his talks with Kim, unlike U.S. negotiators Trump says were too eager to accommodate Iran.
But reaching a credible deal with North Korea will likely be far harder than Iran, according to former U.S. officials and analysts.
The main reason: Unlike Iran, which always said its nuclear program was meant for civilian use, North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and it has even threatened to use them against the United States.
North Korean’s overall nuclear program is more advanced, more widespread, and believed to be partly hidden underground, making it harder to understand and almost impossible to fully disable in a military strike. All those factors give Kim more negotiating leverage than Tehran had during the Obama years.
Reaching that more basic agreement with Iran still took several years of talks, sanctions and implementation work. It included an interim deal as well as coordination with world powers beyond the United States.
A permanent agreement with North Korea – in which the country, at a minimum, eliminates its nuclear stockpile – will also likely to take years to implement, given the size and complexity of its nuclear program. And that’s only if North Korea agrees to give up its nukes, something many analysts say its isolated and paranoid leadership will never do.
Despite Trump’s criticisms of Obama’s “rotten” deal with Iran, he’s already following a similar strategy when it comes to North Korea.
Just as the U.S. and its allies jointly cranked up economic sanctions to bring Tehran to the negotiating table, the Trump administration has rallied other countries around a “maximum pressure campaign” imposing new sanctions on North Korea. The Iranians, their economy in pain, eventually agreed to talk.
The Trump team also has indicated that, like the Iran deal, economic incentives will be at the heart of any agreement with North Korea. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has spoken of private sector investment in North Korea, while Trump said last week that his diplomacy could “usher in a new era of prosperity, security, and peace for all Koreans, for North and South, and for people everywhere.”
While Iran was eager to see sanctions lifted on its oil-exporting economy and has courted foreign investment, North Korea’s demands may be more complicated. North Korea has a smaller and far less globally integrated economy than Iran, making it less vulnerable to sanctions pressure.
North Korea has also spurned offers of economic help, saying in a recent statement that “we have never had any expectation of U.S. support in carrying out our economic construction and will not at all make such a deal in the future.” That leaves many experts predicting that what Kim really wants is assurances about his regime’s security.
One of Trump’s complaints about the Iran deal was that it was too narrow – that it didn’t cover Iran’s ballistic missiles, its sponsorship of terrorism and other vexing matters. Obama aides say that had they tackled those elements, they never would have reached a deal, because Iran refused to discuss issues beyond its nuclear program.
If Trump expands his demands to cover things like North Korea’s atrocious human rights abuses or its stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, that will make any deal harder and more time-consuming. It will also likely require additional U.S. concessions. But leaving such issues untouched will expose Trump to criticism that he went too easy on Kim.
Making matters somewhat easier is the fact that North Korean troublemaking beyond its borders is fairly modest, at least as compared to Iran’s multiple interventions across the Middle East, a region of far more political interest to Washington than East Asia.
It remains unclear what Kim truly wants from Trump. Even the North Korean leader’s stated commitment to “denuclearization” is vague and could mean that he will give up his nuclear arms only over a long period of time or after controversial U.S. steps like a possible removal of America’s 28,500 troops from South Korea.
One sensitive issue will be the duration of any agreement Trump reaches with Kim. Trump complained repeatedly that some provisions of the Iran deal expired after 10 or 15 years, alleging that that would allow Iran to resume a robust nuclear program. Trump insisted, before withdrawing from the deal, that it be modified to restrict Iran’s nuclear activities permanently.
If Trump ends up granting a “sunset” for any North Korea deal, he’ll be open himself to charges of hypocrisy.
In a letter to Trump last week, seven senior Senate Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, laid out tough benchmarks for what they’d like to see in a deal. It starts with the “dismantlement and removal” of all of North Korea’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The Democrats also insisted on severe restrictions on the country’s ballistic missile work, as well as intrusive inspections like those required of Iran.
Ruling out the possibility of sunsets, they declared that “any agreement with North Korea must be permanent in nature.” Their bottom line: Any deal giving North Korea sanctions relief for anything less than “the verifiable performance of its obligations to dismantle its nuclear and missile arsenal is a bad deal.”
In a column published Tuesday, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiators, offered some advice to North Korea ahead of the summit, namely that its “main card in negotiations with the United States is its nuclear weapons.”
“If [North Korea] gives up this bargaining chip upfront, it can forget about the United States implementing its side of the deal,” Mousavian wrote on the NK News website. The Asian country “must seek a phased deal that requires each side to implement its commitments in a step-by-step fashion with proportional reciprocation.”
Trump and Pompeo have already pre-empted one potential talking point from critics of their North Korea diplomacy: that Congress should have a say.
Republicans blasted the Obama White House for structuring the Iran agreement so that it was not a treaty requiring ratification by the U.S. Senate. But Pompeo, who last week called Obama’s 2015 deal as a “flimsy piece of paper,” has said Trump would strive to submit the North Korea deal to the Senate in the form of a treaty.
But with partisan divides so strong, odds are low that a treaty could get the necessary two-thirds approval in the Senate. The more topics a proposed treaty with North Korea tackles, the greater the chances of political opposition – especially if the U.S. is seen as appeasing a regime considered more brutal than the one in Tehran.
At the moment, the Iran nuclear deal hasn’t fully collapsed – European countries who helped negotiate are looking for ways to salvage it, and Iran’s announcement last week is said to be within the deal’s boundaries.
As they watch the Iran deal teeter, some Obama administration officials who helped craft it say they nonetheless hope Trump’s diplomatic overture to Kim succeeds.
Some of them note that a treaty would be difficult to secure, but that it probably would be fine if Congress passes special legislation reviewing any agreement with Kim, just as it did for the Iran deal. The Iran-related legislation requires that the president periodically certify to Congress whether Tehran is complying with the agreement.
When it comes to oversight, it’s important to “not set thresholds that are impossible,” said Wendy Sherman, a former U.S. official who has negotiated with Iran and North Korea.
If Trump can secure an agreement with North Korea that dismantles its nuclear program, tackles other areas of concern and is permanent, it would be a modern-day miracle, former officials and analysts say. The reality, though, is that even getting deal with North Korea that mirrors the one with Iran would be a major accomplishment.
“The Trump administration will be very lucky to get a deal as good the Iran deal with the North Koreans,” DiMaggio said. “It should have been a model to emulate.”
Be First to Comment