By Leslie Shaffer
SINGAPORE (MaceNews) – North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un appears to have been the big winner after the end of his historic summit with U.S. President Trump in Singapore this week, analysts have said.
Trump and Kim signed a document at the conclusion of their talks, which appeared to have four key elements, nearly all of which have been included in agreements with North Korea, with little implementation, for more than twenty years.
The statement filtered into the media in an extremely unorthodox manner, with news organizations reduced to blowing up photos of Trump holding up the paper after he signed it as it wasn’t released.
The four key points were: The U.S. and North Korea committed to establishing improved relations, they would join in efforts to build a lasting peace on the Korean peninsula, North Korea committed to “complete denuclearization,” and North Korea agreed to return the remains of prisoners of war (POWs) and missing in action (MIA) soldiers from the Korean War.
“Complete denuclearization” wasn’t defined; analysts have noted that North Korea in the past has considered this phrase to mean that the U.S. would withdraw its troops from the Korean peninsula.
After months of tough talk and Twitter insults, Trump appears to have handed Kim all of his demands, while the main win for the U.S. was a request Trump said he threw in at the last moment: The return of the soldiers’ remains.
Analysts have previously said that by agreeing to the summit without preconditions, Trump was already handing North Korea a win. After the statement’s release, which analysts were quick to note barely deviated from the language of generally unfulfilled agreements with the pariah nation for decades.
While the statement contained few details, the outlines became far clearer in Trump’s press conference, held in the late afternoon, Singapore time, which indicated the U.S. president had given in to nearly all of North Korea’s demands.
Trump said that he would acquiesce to the North’s demand for “war games” with South Korea to end.
“Number one we save money, a lot, and number two, I think it’s something that he’ll really very much appreciate,” he said, adding that the drills were “provocative.” That’s a claim North Korea has often made.
Trump added a complaint that he believed South Korea wasn’t paying 100 percent of the expenses associated with the military drills.
Trump also complained that the U.S. had to fly in bombers from Guam, approximately 6.5 hours away, and added, “I know a lot about airplanes.”
The U.S. president had another giveaway to North Korea: He said he’d like to bring U.S. troops home from the Korean peninsula.
South Korea’s Blue House, the equivalent of the White House for the U.S., reportedly said that “at this moment, the meaning and intention of President Trump’s remarks requires more clear understanding.”
Separately, a South Korean military official reportedly told NBC News, “we need to find out the exact meaning or intention behind his comments.”
Analysts were generally negative on what the U.S. got out of the deal.
“Apparently jet-fuel is so expensive, it’s worth casting aside a 60-year ally and friend,” North Korea expert Robert E. Kelly, who gained fame globally after his children burst into an on-air BBC interview, said on Twitter on Tuesday.
He called Trump a “dove on North Korea,” and said the signed document was “depressing” and “even thinner than sceptics had anticipated.”
Contrary to Trump’s claims, “It’s not a historical agreement today; basically, it’s nothing that hasn’t been accomplished in the past,” Steve Okun, CEO of APAC Advisors, said in a phone interview on Tuesday.
Okun said Trump had given away a lot in just holding the meeting and that he probably could have negotiated something for it. But he pointed to Trump’s track record of pulling out of deals, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and the Iran nuclear deal, with little record of renegotiations. “Why would you expect that this would be a grand bargain of a deal,” he asked.
But he added he would give the benefit of the doubt that potential developments ahead could be more significant.
Max Fisher, a columnist at the New York Times, also expressed disappointment with the talks.
“The concessions that the U.S. gave away don’t cost it anything, but they can only be traded away once,” Fisher said on Twitter on Tuesday.
But Fisher added that it could have been worse: “There were hints Trump would give away much larger concessions for nothing, and he didn’t. There was risk of a blow-up that could lead to war. Also didn’t happen.”
When it comes to what the U.S. got in return, Trump, after being asked how it would be verified whether the North was fulfilling promises to denuclearize and wind down its missile programs, was vague, saying only “it will be verified.” He said that Kim didn’t previously have this level of confidence in a president before. He didn’t explain how this deal would be different from what he called a “disgraceful” deal with Iran.
Trump has violated the multi-nation agreement with Iran, signed by former President Barack Obama, for that country to give up its nuclear weapons programs in exchange for the removal of sanctions. Iran had passed all of its nuclear inspections.
When asked about what the U.S. might do militarily if North Korea doesn’t fulfil its vague promises of denuclearization, Trump said that’s a tough thing to talk about.” He added that Seoul is “right next to” the border and cited the number of people living there. Seoul is about 35 miles from the DMZ.
Trump added that this deal would help save 30 million lives; he never explained why those lives were in danger or whose lives they were. The population of South Korea exceeds 50 million, while the population of North Korea is more than 25 million.
In addition, Trump said he could be certain the nuclear program was dismantled by claiming that once the nuclear program was about 20 percent dismantled, it wouldn’t be possible to restart it; it was unclear what the source of this claim was, but Trump did refer to an uncle that he said worked at MIT. That uncle, John G. Trump, was a physicist who helped develop cancer treatments using radiation and who worked on precision bombing radar. It is unclear why Trump referenced the uncle in relation to verifying North Korea’s commitments.
Trump did insist that Kim had made more concessions than were immediately apparent.
For one, Trump pointed to Kim’s decision to bring North Korean athletes to compete in the Winter Olympics in South Korea in February. Trump insisted that North Korea’s presence made the Olympics a “success,” and then falsely claimed that without a boost to ticket sales from its attendance, the Olympics might not have been able to proceed. Nearly all of the funding for every Olympics comes from selling media rights and corporate sponsorships.
Trump also said that North Korea has given up its nuclear test site, with the country earlier this year allowing in journalists, but not the professionals it had previously promised, to see the site demolished. To be sure, after its last nuclear test in late 2017, some experts said that seismic activity indicated the force of the blast had caused the site to collapse.
Trump also said that Kim would give up its missile development, indicating this could be confirmed via heat mapping via satellite.
Some analysts were extremely negative on the outcome.
“The fact that there isn’t any mention of a ‘verifiable and irreversible denuclearization’ arguably suggests that they are still not on the same page as far as concretely defining this concept,” Anwita Basu, analyst at The Economist Intelligence Unit, said in a note on Tuesday.
She said she believes that behind closed doors, the North hasn’t agreed to dismantle its nuclear weapons and is instead only agreeing to slow the process in exchange for the talks.
“This is a huge win for the DPRK. In fact, it could be argued, that this is what the North Koreans have been working towards for so long: being legitimized as a state, despite its isolation,” she said.