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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
What Does Kim Jong Un Really Want From the Summit in Singapore?
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What Does Kim Jong Un Really Want From the Summit in Singapore?
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A
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This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. It's Thursday, June 7th. Dr. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. Next Tuesday, President Trump meets in Singapore with Kim Jong Un after the two leaders sophomoric name calling and mutual ominous threats of nuclear conflagration. Early in the Trump administration, Trump tried the opposite tack of flattering Kim. We're having very, very good discussions. Kim Jong Un was he really has been very open and I think very honorable from everything we're seeing now. A lot of promises have been made by North Korea over the years, but they've never been in this position. Trump then called off the summit before changing his mind again when Kim indicated he was still willing to talk. Evan Osnos joins me to discuss what Kim Jong Un really wants from the summit and how his rapid diplomatic maneuvering has gotten the U.S. south Korea and China more or less where he wants them to be, recognizing him as a wily power broker in Northeast Asia. Evan, welcome.
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C
Thanks, Dorothy.
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B
This September will mark the 70th anniversary of the Founding of North Korea under Kim Jong Un's grandfather. In recent months, as these two very volatile leaders have lurched toward the summit, the press has focused mostly on earlier failed efforts by American presidents to get Kim's predecessors to agree to denuclearization. But Kim Jong un is only 34. He could be running North Korea for the next 50 years. He's also vowed to really improve the living standards of his people. So isn't this summit as much about the economy as it is about his nuclear program?
- [03:16]
C
It is. And I think that's something that we often, you know, there's this tendency, understandably, for people in the west to sort of look at Kim Jong Un and think of him as just a sort of, you know, Kim 3.0, which is how people joked about him in Washington. When he first came on the scene in 2011, he sort of looked a bit like his grandfather. And he made a point of trying to look even more like him, to sort of borrow some of that glow. But the truth is, they come from very different moments. And his father and his grandfather were really products of the Soviet era in every way, and they were always allergic to the idea of market economic reforms. His father tried it a little bit, but kind of backed away. But Kim Jong Un, from the time he came in, has begun to show a recognition that he could not run this country forever if it remained as poor and as backward as it was. And so he started to take these kind of tenuous tiptoeing steps into the world of economic reform. And it turned out now, I think that that really was a precursor to this broader opening that we may be seeing.
- [04:29]
B
And what about the earlier failed summits with Trump's predecessors? Are there lessons there that one hopes the administration is taking forward?
- [04:39]
C
Yeah, in some ways, the best record that we have of what it's like to negotiate with the North Koreans comes from Madeleine Albright, because back in 2000, which long time ago now, but she was the first American Secretary of State to go to North Korea. She and Kim Jong Il, father of the current leader, negotiated for 12 hours over a couple of days about a deal over his missile program. And she came away with a really important observation, which is that in many ways, the North Koreans can look as if they're doing things in a sort of chaotic way. They use this really bellicose, over the top language, consistently alienating people after drawing them close. But underneath it, you tend to see this long range planning. And as Wendy Sherman, who was one of Madeleine Albright's aides on that Trip told me at one point, she said, you know, they think in these four year, six year time frames, they really are thinking about how to achieve these strategic objectives. We have to be thinking about what is it that Kim Jong Un is thinking about from a long range perspective. And that long range perspective is about survival for him. And it means both personal survival, meaning, you know, reduce the threat for the United States, but also figure out how to get your country onto a more sustainable footing.
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B
And that's where China comes in, which China's always been critical to North Korea's survival, but it's been such a fraught relationship. Explain that dynamic a little bit.
- [06:09]
C
Yeah, they have this really tense interdependence. After all, if you talk to any North Korean, they will tell you that they have been invaded literally hundreds of times over the course of their long, ancient history by China. So this idea that they are sort of easy partners has never been quite right. They're very wary of being subject to Chinese influence or control. But in some obvious ways, they really need to look to China as a source of trade and inspiration. 90% of North Korea's external trade goes through China. But for a long time, the Chinese government tried to make the case to the North Korean government that, look, you can have the sort of political system that we have where you maintain rigid political control and yet also open up your economy enough so that it can begin to grow. And the father, Kim Jong Il, and the grandfather, Kim Il Sung, they were really wary of that. But what you're beginning to see now among North Korea experts who follow this very closely is that they're hearing in the language of Kim Jong Un, the kinds of gestures, the sorts of moves that he's making are reminiscent in some ways of what China did at the end of the 1970s. When Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978 and the country was devastated by the Cultural Revolution and all of the political mania. And what he said was, this is unsustainable. And he began to open the country towards the free market. Now, I should point out here, China remains a very unfree country, and there's no reason to expect that North Korea is going to find itself pursuing a democratic route. But what it means is also that it may be moving in the direction of trying to at least find a way back into the family of nations and out of its isolation.
- [07:58]
B
And you went to North Korea not so long ago and when you were there, I want to hear again a little bit of your impressions, because it was a combination of this acute paranoia of this little countryside by side with this very big country that has been so aggressive, but also a sense of what they want to BE in the 21st century, what North Korea aspires to be.
- [08:23]
C
When you talk to North Koreans in Pyongyang, they are quick to criticize China. They will say, look, we're never going to follow the Chinese path. But if you can kind of get beyond that rhetoric, you see the signs of it everywhere, that they are borrowing lessons not only from China, but also from other places that have pursued this kind of market authoritarianism. Vietnam, Singapore, a little bit of South Korea in the 60s and 70s. If you go around the capital of North Korea today, you will see signs of market activity everywhere. I mean, there are literally marketplaces, some of which are legal, some of which are sort of tolerated. And for the young, wealthy elites, which is a world that foreigners like to call Pyong Hatton, there are, you know, sushi joints and squash courts. And to state the obvious here, this is inaccessible to most of the country, which lives in a very poor condition.
- [09:16]
B
Within memory of famines.
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C
Yeah, and the famine that was in the 1990s, which was devastating, killed millions of people, was also, in some ways, the beginning of this process, because the government concluded that the horror of the famine had made it impossible for them to then restore the old socialist economy. And they had to give people some greater realm of economic life. And that was the seed that then germinated into this kind of gray zone of capitalistic economy that exists today. America is changing, and so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.
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Every weekday, we'll bring you a story.
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From this intersection where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
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B
Just a year ago, it seems just about everyone was worried that Kim was unstable with, you know, all kinds of disastrous ramifications. Over the last six months, we've seen him emerge as a kind of a master of political stagecraft. You know, we saw him worm his way into the Olympics to make overtures to the U.S. the famous train ride to China. And now he's more or less calling the shots on this summit.
- [10:51]
C
Well, it's been a heroic act of political rebranding. They haveyou know, you have to say, North Koreans can be pretty clumsy on the International stage in some respects. But when it comes to how they have tried to figure out who they're dealing with in South Korea, with Moon Jae in and Donald Trump in Washington, they've been pretty effective at being able to figure out where those two leaders want to go and then capitalize on it. So Moon Jae in has wanted engagement with North Korea for decades. They sensed that, and they met him there. And so you ended up with these images of the two of them walking hand in hand across the border between the north and south, which has been a great boon to both of their PR around the world. And then, of course, with Donald Trump, he recognized that Trump saw himself as the dealmaker. And then Kim dangled the prospect in front of him, and Trump took the invitation even faster than than the North Koreans and the South Koreans expected him to. And now they will find each other face to face. And it'll be a sort of the moment to test both Donald Trump's ability as a dealmaker and also Kim Jong Un's genuine willingness to open up to the outside world, if that's what he's trying to do.
- [12:05]
B
What does Trump want out of this, do you think?
- [12:09]
C
I think there's two levels. One is the short term political gain, which is real for him. He's seen that the approach to North Korea has polled very well. It's a cynical thing to say, but it's a reality here in Washington. He knows that Americans, by and large, want to see some improvement in this relationship. Nobody wants to look down the barrel of another war. And then more deeply, he came into office with a pretty acute sense that the North Korean problem was going to be one of his biggest predicaments. Barack Obama, when he was leaving office, said to Trump, famously, that the biggest problem you're going to face in foreign affairs is North Korea. And that has kind of loomed over the administration because they really approached this issue with a greater focus and obsession in some ways than some people thought they should. They said, you know, you're inflating the North Korean issue. But I think he realizes that for him to be regarded and to try to restore some of America's reputation as a major influential steward of the global order, that trying to bring peace to the peninsula would be a game changer.
- [13:20]
B
And what about denuclearization? Is that going to be the major sticking point?
- [13:25]
C
Well, he has backed off of that somewhat for a long time. Trump and his administration said that this summit could only happen if the end goal was what they call complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization. But when the summit began to wobble and it looked like it wasn't going to happen, Trump pulled out. The North Koreans said, fine, they got back together. But Trump is now saying something very, very different. When he met with the number two leader in the North Korean government recently in the Oval Office, he emerged and said, in Trump's words, that this is going to be a get to know you situation. And he said nobody expected this to happen all at once. In fact, his administration had said many times they were looking for a sort of big bang form of diplomacy where things could happen very fast. But there is a realization that that's just not how diplomacy works. And I think there's a. For people who are quick to criticize Donald Trump's foreign policy, it's easy to say, oh, well, he's, you know, moving around and changing the goal of the summit, but actually he's moving it in a more rational and reasonable direction, which is to say, let's embark on a serious process of diplomacy rather than imagining some sort of magical one day solution to a really hard problem.
- [14:41]
B
And it'll be in both sides interest to come away with some kind of agreement. How likely is it that there could be a peace treaty to replace the armistice in 53 that ended the Korean War?
- [14:56]
C
It's possible. I don't think it's going to be top priority because it's a hard one. I think most likely they're going to come out of their with a joint statement which sounds really bland, but is in fact the first step towards meaningful progress that would basically commit them to the ultimate goal of eventually getting rid of the nuclear weapons. And along the way, there would be this phased process of the outside world giving some investment or aid to North Korea while they dismantle parts of their weapons program. I think that's a reasonable standard to go for. But a peace treaty? It's possible, but there are a lot of moving parts, and I think that may take longer.
- [15:42]
B
And finally, there's been a lot of talk about divisions within the Trump administration. Are you getting the sense that everyone's moving forward, you know, with a unified goal here?
- [15:53]
C
I don't think they're moving forward with a unified goal, but I think that they have wrestled themselves into submission. There was two very clear camps here, one represented by John Bolton, the national security adviser, who's been very explicit over the years in pursuing regime change in North Korea. And heand his statements that he'd made in preparations for the summit, they were really tanking the thing it was the North Koreans pulled out of the summit after Bolton spoke on television about a Libya model. And since then, Bolton has sort of been pushed to the side, and he was not in the meeting that the president had with the North Korean number two, Kim Yong Chol. So there's a clear sense that right now this process is being led by Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State and the president himself, and some of the more hawkish members of the administration, if we can still use that spectrum, are, for the moment, in abeyance.
- [16:50]
B
Thanks so much, Evan.
- [16:51]
C
Thanks, Dorothy.
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B
Evan Osnos is a staff writer and the author of Age of Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. This podcast is produced by Jill Duboff, Alex Barron, and Hannah W. Lentz. For new yorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
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