For the record, we wish President Trump was right about North Korea when he was optimistic about his ability to alter the regime’s nuclear intentions. We also wish he was right when he declared victory after his summit with the regime’s top dog, Kim Jong Un, earlier this year.
But the truth is that Kim isn’t moving his country toward the norms of a civilized nation. And if actions speak louder than words, the Trump administration is now mounting a substantive argument that little has changed on the northern end of the Korean peninsula.
In recent days Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, was compelled to cancel a trip to Pyongyang, and this week news broke that talks are at an impasse between the U.S. and North Korea. The sticking point now is that Kim is insisting the United States sign on to officially ending the Korean War before he does anything else to pretend he actually wants to be a responsible world leader.
Of course, the shooting stopped in 1953 with an armistice, but no formal peace treaty was signed to end the Korean War – which means that technically a state of war still exists. That is unnerving to Kim, who is perpetually paranoid that other nations might be able to use the cover of a decades-old conflict to carry out military operations against him.
We don’t want to tell Kim this, but there is no appetite (or political will) in the United States for launching a fresh shooting war in Korea. But there is also no reason to ease the dictator’s worries either, unless he is willing to make a meaningful (and verifiable) concession to lessen the chances of conflict (nuclear or otherwise) between North Korea and any other country in the world.
Trump was hoping he’d made progress toward such a concession three months ago. And he can point to the dismantling of some nuclear infrastructure as well as receiving material that might be the remains of U.S. service members killed in the Korean conflict.
Now it appears that North Korea isn’t stopping its drive toward refining its nuclear strike capabilities, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog. And until DNA testing is completed, no one can be sure whether we got back the remains of U.S. service members. In the past, the North Koreans have turned over animal bones in place of human remains.
All of this is why we’ve long preferred pushing North Korea to grant concessions on human rights to anything else. By pressuring the North to respect the rights of its people, the United States won’t lose sight of its long-term objectives of spreading human rights. Those objectives place the U.S. on the right side of the moral struggle of our time, and they have the ability to defang and ultimately consign to the ash-heap of history rogue regimes that threaten peace in the world.
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