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Trump Says U.S. Is Paying ‘Extortion Money’ to North Korea Trump Says He Will Not Talk to North Korea. Experts Fear He Will.
(about 11 hours later)
WASHINGTON — In a post on Twitter on Wednesday, President Trump accused past administrations of paying “extortion money” to North Korea and said diplomatic talks are not sufficient. WASHINGTON — President Trump vowed on Wednesday that he would not talk to Kim Jong-un, cooling off what has become his on-again, off-again cultivation of North Korea’s rogue dictator.
“The U.S. has been talking to North Korea, and paying them extortion money, for 25 years. Talking is not the answer!” Mr. Trump wrote. But if Mr. Trump’s tweet, in which he said, “talking is not the answer!,” seemed to reignite tensions with North Korea, it also revealed a paradox in how Asia experts view the crisis. Some fear less that Mr. Trump is going to start a war with Mr. Kim than that he is going to stumble into a risky, unpredictable dialogue with him.
It was not clear what money the president was referring to. Mr. Trump has been both open to and against talks with North Korea. Last week, the president said he thought Pyongyang was starting to respect the United States, but then North Korea brazenly launched a missile this week over Japan, forcing Japanese residents to take cover. The missile landed harmlessly in the ocean. The world’s attention has understandably focused on Mr. Trump’s saber-rattling threats against Mr. Kim — most dramatically, his promise to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea if Mr. Kim fired ballistic missiles at United States territory.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said that North Korea’s message had been received. But a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim, these experts said, could open the door to ratifying North Korea’s nuclear status or scaling back America’s joint military exercises with South Korea. That could sunder American alliances with Japan and South Korea and play to the benefit of China, which has long advocated direct dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang.
“The world has received North Korea’s latest message loud and clear: This regime has signaled its contempt for its neighbors, for all members of the United Nations,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “What the North Koreans are angling for is to bring the danger and tension to a crescendo, and then to pivot to a peace proposal,” said Daniel R. Russel, who served until March as the assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs. “All of this is focused on pressuring the U.S. to enter direct talks with Kim on his terms. That is the big trap.”
Past American administrations have tried diplomatic approaches and imposed sanctions on North Korea in an effort to convince North Korea to abandon its weapons programs. Previous presidents avoided that trap, Mr. Russel said, even if Bill Clinton briefly contemplated meeting Mr. Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il. But Mr. Trump brings a deal-maker’s swagger to the North Korea issue that his predecessors did not. He has in the past expressed a willingness to sit across a table from the willful young scion of North Korea’s ruling family.
Over the years, the United States has given money to North Korea for humanitarian assistance. And attempts to establish better relations have included lessening some of the economic sanctions on the North. The United States and North Korea do not have formal diplomatic relations. “I would speak to him,” Mr. Trump said during the presidential campaign. “I would have no problem speaking to him.” Last April, he said, “If it would be appropriate for me to meet with him, I would absolutely; I would be honored to do it.”
In 2013, Mr. Trump questioned the financial relationship between South Korea and the United States for protection from North Korea. While the Pentagon has drawn up options for a military strike on the North, officials concede it would be all but impossible, given the retaliation it would provoke and the calamitous casualties that would result. Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, reflected that internal consensus when he told The American Prospect, “There’s no military solution. Forget it.”
And during the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump complained about the expense of defending South Korea and Japan, saying those countries did not pay a fair share for the United States bases there. That leaves diplomacy, which Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson and other officials have made clear is still the administration’s preferred course. If North Korea curbs its behavior, Mr. Tillerson said recently, there is a “pathway to sometime in the early future having some dialogue.”
Hours after Mr. Trump ruled out talks on Twitter, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis contradicted him. “We’re never out of diplomatic solutions,” he told reporters. In Geneva, Robert A. Wood, the American ambassador to the Conference on Disarmament, said the United States remained open to dialogue. “We do not seek to be a threat to the Kim Jong-un regime,” he said.
Trying to explain Mr. Trump’s tweet, Mr. Wood, who was once the State Department’s acting spokesman, said, “What the president is saying is that he doesn’t see talking as solving this problem and part of the reason is that the North is not interested in dialogue.”
Indeed, Mr. Trump’s sudden hostility to talks appeared to be less a reversal of his previous statements than an expression of frustration with Mr. Kim’s continued belligerence. Days after Mr. Trump praised him for his newfound restraint, Mr. Kim lobbed a missile over Japan.
For now, a Trump-Kim summit remains a far-fetched notion. Even if North Korea was interested in speaking to the United States, its string of belligerent actions — not to mention the June death of Otto F. Warmbier, the Ohio college student held for nearly 18 months in Pyongyang — would make a meeting politically untenable for Mr. Trump.
In his tweet, the president declared, “The U.S. has been talking to North Korea, and paying them extortion money, for 25 years.” While Mr. Trump’s precise meaning was unclear, he seemed to be referring to the promises of fuel oil, nuclear-power reactors, humanitarian aid and the lifting of sanctions that accompanied previous diplomatic negotiations.
Mr. Trump, experts said, is correct that talks with North Korea — whether conducted by Democratic or Republican administrations — have been costly and unproductive. And with the North Koreans now capable, by some estimates, of producing an atomic bomb every sixth or seventh week, the cost of reaching any new agreement would be even higher.
“We’re long past the point where we can fob them off with a few light-water reactors,” said Michael Auslin, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, who argued in an essay in Politico Magazine this week that Mr. Trump should shun negotiations in favor of a policy of explicitly deterring and containing a nuclear North Korea.
Other experts said it was not diplomacy itself that was problematic — particularly if the United States negotiated, along with its allies and China — but that Mr. Trump, acting alone, could be an unpredictable negotiator.
“Trump is not the first president to think he can make a deal with these guys,” said Mr. Auslin. “Bill Clinton thought he was the great negotiator. His aides thought if they could get him in a room with Kim Jong-il, they could seal a deal. There’s clearly a sense, because of the capriciousness of Trump and the ‘Art of the Deal,’ that he could do the same.”
Mr. Trump’s tweet could be interpreted as a negotiating tactic. But experts said he was not helping his case with his wildly divergent statements about Mr. Kim. Last Tuesday, at a rally in Phoenix, Mr. Trump said, “I respect the fact that I believe he is starting to respect us. I respect that fact very much.”
Further complicating the administration’s approach is its weak diplomatic bench. It still has not named an assistant secretary for East Asian affairs and no ambassador is in Seoul, although the White House is close to nominating Victor D. Cha, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration and well-regarded North Korea expert at Georgetown University.
Some experts said they took comfort from the fact that in any summit meeting, the North Koreans would never allow the Americans to determine either the setting or the terms of the negotiation. For a deal maker and showman like Mr. Trump, that would probably be unacceptable.
“I suspect that in the end, the president might fall back on his event-planning background,” said Michael J. Green, who served as a top Asia adviser to Mr. Bush. “This is not a Miss Universe pageant or a pro wrestling match, so that might stop Trump in his tracks.”