If you are trying to figure out what our policy on North Korea is, and what our position on talks actually is, you’re going to have your hands full. The president has boasted about a nonexistent nuclear button and ridiculed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for trying diplomacy. Tillerson has consistently said he’ll talk anytime, anyplace. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has said North Korea has to agree to stop its program before sitting down with us.
Then in the past month things got
really confusing.
On Feb. 6, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said flat-out, “We have no plans to meet with North Korea during the Olympics or after the Olympics. We have no plans to do so.”
Just two days later, on Feb. 8,
the possibility of a meeting between Vice President Pence and the North Koreans:
QUESTION: Would the U.S. be open to a diplomatic breakthrough between North and South Korea, and are there any concerns about a possible clash between the U.S. and South Korea on this?
MS. NAUERT: Let me go back and remind folks that we have an incredibly strong ally relationship with not only the Republic of Korea, but also Japan. These are ironclad relationships. You saw the Vice President’s meetings that he had with President Moon. . . .
The United States will not back away from its ally, and no one is going to drive a wedge between the United States and the Republic of Korea and the United States and also Japan. The Vice President spoke very eloquently about his meetings that he had. . . .
QUESTION: Okay, just very quickly. Now that South Korea is apparently actively trying to broker some kind of meeting between U.S. and North Korea officials, is that something that the State Department would welcome?
MS. NAUERT: Yeah, so I don’t want to get ahead of the Vice President. My job is not to make news while the Vice President is traveling in the region. That’s part of it. I can help facilitate some conversations about that. But let me highlight some of the things that he said about a potential meeting or whatever you want to call it.
He said, “We have no [sic] requested a meeting in North Korea, but if I have any contact with them in any context over the next two days, my message will be the same as it is here today: North Korea needs to once and for all abandon its nuclear and ballistic missile ambitions, and the pressure will continue on them economically and diplomatically until that is accomplished. The time has come for North Korea to abandon its nuclear and ballistic missile ambitions, set aside its long pattern of deception and provocation, and then, only then, can we begin to move forward to a peaceable outcome on the Peninsula.” Okay?
On Feb. 13,
to deny the administration had ever ruled out talks (President Trump, you will recall, had publicly said talking was a waste of time):
QUESTION: So you said that – so seems to be a change in our policy, because you’ve said many times before we’re not going to talk to them at all until denuclearization’s on the table. So how does that – is that a change?
MS. NAUERT: No. No. I think part of the conversation is, look, to realize the – to be able to set the agenda for what you’re going to talk about, and that would be denuclearization, you may have to have a preliminary chat about what that discussion would look like.
QUESTION: But wasn’t it before you’re saying no chats at all?
MS. NAUERT: I think we’ve always been clear about our policy of denuclearization, and that has not changed and we hope to be able to get there. And it’s not just our policy, it’s many other countries’ policies as well.
On Feb. 15, the
had a different take, suggesting talks would be premature:
MS. NAUERT: The Secretary has said repeatedly that we are starting to see signs that our maximum pressure campaign is putting strain on North Korea. Now, you’re going to ask, what are those signs, what are the strain that he’s seen? That’s something that we just won’t detail, but we’re keeping a close eye on it.
If the time comes that we believe that North Korea is serious about talking about denuclearization, we will have a conversation with our partners, with our allies, with our allies in the region, about the appropriate next steps. So we’re not there yet.
:
Vice President Pence departed for a five-day, two-country swing through Asia earlier this month having agreed to a secret meeting with North Korean officials while in South Korea at the 2018 Winter Olympic Games.
But on Feb. 10, less than two hours before Pence and his team were to meet with Kim Yo Jong, the younger sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and Kim Yong Nam, North Korea’s nominal head of state, the North Koreans pulled out of the scheduled meeting, according to Pence’s office.
The North Korean decision to withdraw from the meeting came after Pence used his trip to denounce the North’s nuclear ambitions and announce the “toughest and most aggressive” sanctions yet against the regime, while also taking steps to further solidify the U.S. alliance with Japan and South Korea.
Got that? Try to figure out what preconditions, if any, we have for talking to the North Koreans. See if you can sync Trump’s tough language with an offer of an, unprecedented, extremely high-level talk with the vice president (which would surely have been a PR coup) apparently for nothing in return. I asked several outside foreign policy gurus from both Democratic and Republican administrations how to explain all this — what’s our policy supposed to be? One said, “This administration is in such internal disarray, I wonder if there’s an actual answer to your question.” Another observed, “I don’t understand anything they are doing.” A third observed, “The real answer is that the Trump administration doesn’t know what it’s doing on North Korea, and it’s showing.”
Now, if our own people cannot figure out what we are trying to accomplish and how we are going to get there, how do we think the South Koreans, the Japanese or, for that matter, the North Koreans will? As with so much else in this administration, the combination of a president devoid of policy expertise and prone to outbursts, plus a cacophony of voices in the national security realm, render our “policy” unintelligible.
