Larison: "Read The Trump-Kim Memorandum--The Devil Is In The Details"

link

   The Singapore summit between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was quite a spectacle, but the show the two leaders put on produced virtually nothing of substance. If we judge this summit the way we would judge a high-level meeting held by any other president, it’s clear that it failed to deliver what the administration wanted. This wasn’t a great accomplishment for the president, though he has a strong incentive to present it that way and continue on the diplomatic track for now. Despite its disappointment, however, if the summit is followed up by productive negotiations, it could still reduce tensions between Washington and Pyongyang.

   The consensus among Korea and arms control experts is that the statement that the Singapore summit produced was not nearly as comprehensive or specific as previous agreements with North Korea. That much is indisputable. There was no specific commitment by Pyongyang to get rid of its nuclear weapons, much less its entire nuclear program; no mention of rejoining the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); and no reference to ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Nothing about North Korea’s missile program appears in the text. There is also nothing about verification. If the purpose of the summit was to make progress on disagreements over nuclear weapons and missiles, it didn’t do that at all.
   But then this round of U.S.-North Korean negotiations is only just getting started. The decision to hold a high-level meeting first and then hammer out the details later means that the summit could not possibly have produced an agreement as thorough or meaningful as previous negotiations did. Many critics of the summit, myself included, objected to the meeting for just this reason. This was not because we opposed seeking a diplomatic solution to the standoff with North Korea, but because we saw no value in holding a summit at the start of a process instead of reaching an agreement first through detailed negotiations carried out by officials who understand these issues. As it happened, the U.S. delegation lacked the technical experts that it needed to reach a more substantive agreement, and the president made no effort to prepare himself to talk about the technical issues. The critics’ objection that the summit was held too soon appears to have been vindicated.