<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
NEWS ANALYSIS:<\/strong><\/p>\n The Singapore summit of President Trump and Kim Jong-un projected potent images of peace and diplomacy between two leaders who traded nuclear war threats just a year ago, but the output generated a large wave of initial skepticism that the U.S. side got any tangible or permanent concession from the North Korean dictator on Tuesday.<\/p>\n Foreign policy analysts said North Korea and its closest allies, China and Russia, scored a diplomatic victory in Singapore and that the meeting legitimized Mr. Kim, a human rights abuser with a spot on America\u2019s list of state sponsors of terrorism.<\/p>\n Mr. Kim, in the two leaders\u2019 joint statement, committed only to \u201cwork toward\u201d the \u201ccomplete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula\u201d \u2014 a promise Mr. Kim made to South Korean President Moon Jae-in in April. In addition to sitting down with Mr. Kim, Mr. Trump revealed after the meeting broke up that he agreed to freeze U.S.-South Korean military drills, a promise that was bolstered by the president\u2019s unscripted comments on wanting to \u201cbring home\u201d the 32,000 U.S. troops from the peninsula.<\/p>\n Such a development, analysts say, would play directly into China\u2019s hand at a moment when Beijing is expanding its military operations across the region. China had been strongly pushing the \u201cfreeze-for-freeze\u201d formula \u2014 a halt to North Korean nuclear tests and activities in exchange for a halt to U.S.-South Korean military exercises \u2014 long before Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump met this week.<\/p>\n Liberal critics quickly claimed Mr. Trump gave away too much too fast without demanding more specific language from Mr. Kim on denuclearization. Language pushed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for a \u201ccomplete, verified, irreversible\u201d end to the North\u2019s nuclear and missile programs was notably absent from the public accord.<\/p>\n But Michael Pillsbury, the Mandarin-speaking security consultant who worked closely with nearly every U.S. administration since Richard Nixon, took a more optimistic posture, arguing that the focus should be on how the summit represented the start of a potentially game-changing geopolitical shift and an unprecedented U.S.-Chinese policy coordination toward North Korea.<\/p>\n \u201cPresident Trump has not given much credit to China yet, but I believe he will do so later \u2026,\u201d Mr. Pillsbury said. \u201cChina not only provided the Air China aircraft [that delivered Mr. Kim to Singapore], Beijing did not respond to American threats last year to attack the North\u2019s nuclear facilities.\u201d<\/p>\n China had also agreed to the tougher \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d sanctions championed by Mr. Trump, he said, suggesting that Beijing even played a critical behind-the-scenes role in orchestrating direct diplomatic engagement between Washington and Pyongyang. What President Trump has done, Mr. Pillsbury said, is accept a \u201cdouble freeze\u201d that China has promoted over the past year with public and private assertions that \u201cthe best deal can only be a freeze on all U.S. military exercises to be synchronized with a freeze on [North Korean] missile and nuclear testing.\u201d<\/p>\n Ambassador Joseph DeTrani, who served as a top U.S. negotiator with Pyongyang before the last attempt at diplomacy broke down in 2009, said the current status quo is better than the insult-trading, \u201cfire and fury\u201d rhetoric of last year. \u201cI think we\u2019re in a good place, certainly compared to eight months ago,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But several conservative analysts offered a harsher take.<\/p>\n \u201cAll the initial benefits were pocketed by Pyongyang \u2014 and all the initial concessions were offered by Washington,\u201d said Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist and Asia specialist at the American Enterprise Institute.<\/p>\n \u201cAmerica and her allies must now move into damage control and salvage mode.\u201d<\/p>\n Others predicted it will be difficult for the Trump administration to maintain broad U.N. Security Council sanctions pressure on North Korea, with both South Korea and China eager to re-establish economic links with the North currently blocked by international sanctions.<\/p>\n Beijing was already showing signs Tuesday of wanting to walk back U.N. sanctions. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters that \u201cChina has consistently held that sanctions are not the goal in themselves\u201d and that \u201cthe Security Council\u2019s actions should support and conform to the efforts of current diplomatic talks towards denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula.\u201d<\/p>\n Srinivasan Sitaraman, a political scientist at Clark University in Massachusetts, said the impetus of Chinese support for Washington\u2019s sanctions campaign may already be lost. \u201cI doubt Russia or China will go along with the U.S. to maintain the maximum pressure policy going forward,\u201d he told The Washington Times.<\/p>\n If North Korea did well, China may have done even better from the summit.<\/p>\n \u201cNapoleon had this saying that, \u2018When your enemies are making a mistake, get out of their way,\u2019 and I think on a strategic level that\u2019s how Beijing is viewing this,\u201d said Michael J. Green, a Center for Strategic International Studies analyst, who once served as Asian affairs director on President George W. Bush\u2019s National Security Council.<\/p>\n Republican lawmakers remained wary as well, given that Mr. Kim\u2019s father, Kim Jong-il, committed far more explicitly back in 2005 to \u201cabandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs,\u201d only to renege on the promise.<\/p>\n House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, Texas Republican, said that while it\u2019s \u201cperfectly reasonable to hope that we are seeing the beginning of a process that will lead to a complete, permanent, verifiable end to North Korea\u2019s nuclear capabilities,\u201d it is \u201calso perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of North Korea\u2019s intentions, given its history of broken agreements.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe key going forward will be North Korea\u2019s actions, not their promises,\u201d Mr. Thornberry said. \u201cIn the meantime, it is essential to maintain economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure, and above all to continue strengthening our military capability to defend ourselves and our allies.\u201d<\/p>\n Patrick Cronin, the top Asia security analyst at the Center for a New American Security, was one of a number of analysts who said it was far too soon to judge the success or failure of the Singapore summit. \u201cThe coming few months will give us a better indication as to whether [this] was an expensive photo opportunity or a positive breakthrough,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe good news is that longtime adversaries have shown that they can talk, and now the White House has a channel with the top leader in Pyongyang,\u201d Mr. Cronin told The Times. \u201cThe bad news is that the hard decisions now need to be made on a relatively tight timeline.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Trump emphasized that the summit was only the start of a much deeper process to include specific talks on denuclearization \u201cvery, very quickly,\u201d with Mr. Pompeo leading the charge and National Security Adviser John R. Bolton closely involved.<\/p>\n The challenge ahead is likely to center on how patient the two aides, who have both espoused hawkish views toward North Korea in the past, will be if Pyongyang wavers going forward. One source close to the White House who spoke on the condition of anonymity said a battle is already unfolding within the administration over how aggressively to proceed with Mr. Kim.<\/p>\n The fight finds Mr. Bolton, who wants a bare-knuckle posture and short deadlines for the delivery of proof of denuclearization, pitted against acting Assistant Secretary of State for Asia Susan Thornton, who has advocated behind the scenes for a softer and more gradual approach.<\/p>\n If criticism of Mr. Trump\u2019s handling of the Singapore summit mounts during the coming days, said the source, Mr. Bolton and others, including National Security Council Asia Director Matthew Pottinger, are likely to try to \u201cblame the negative optics on Thornton\u201d and push her out of the administration.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NEWS ANALYSIS: The Singapore summit of President Trump and Kim Jong-un projected potent images of peace and diplomacy between two leaders who traded nuclear war threats just a year ago, but the output NEWS ANALYSIS: The Singapore summit of President Trump and Kim Jong-un projected potent images of peace and diplomacy between two leaders who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,8],"tags":[264,324,34,578],"class_list":["post-3164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-worlds","tag-donald-trump","tag-north-korea","tag-politics","tag-singapore"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}