TRUMP, XI AND HOW TO PLAY POKER WITH PYONGYANG / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENT & ANALYSIS

Trump, Xi and how to play poker with Pyongyang

Only Sino-American understanding can ensure lasting agreement on the Korean peninsula

Philip Stephens



A summit in prospect with America’s Donald Trump. An audience in the Great Hall of the People with China’s Xi Jinping. We can only guess, but the odds are that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is feeling rather pleased with himself. A backward, brutally repressive regime ruling a nation of 25m now commands the undivided attention of the leaders of the world’s foremost powers.

The international community should welcome Mr Kim’s visit to Beijing. The alternative might well have been war. Only months ago Mr Trump was promising to rain fire and fury on Pyongyang to destroy its nuclear weapons programme. The US president refused to contemplate a North Korean nuclear missile capable of hitting America’s west coast. The potential costs of a military conflict are incalculable. Yet Beijing has been unwilling or unable to restrain its recalcitrant ally and neighbour.

Now, on the face of it, we have the prospect of real diplomacy. By sending a North Korean delegation to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, Mr Kim broke the freeze in relations with South Korea. His offer to meet Mr Trump upended calculations in Washington and put US military preparations on hold. The Beijing trip has signalled that China now feels obliged to lift the exclusion order it had imposed on Mr Kim in response to his repeated defiance of demands to rein back the nuclear programme.

The official Chinese Xinhua news agency reported that Mr Xi had lauded his guest: “This year there have been promising changes in the situation on the Korean peninsula, and we express our appreciation for the major efforts that North Korea has made in this direction.” These words come after years during which Mr Kim has excoriated Beijing for supporting UN sanctions against Pyongyang. Mr Xi, a new Chinese emperor in all but name, is not accustomed to such climbdowns. But if Mr Kim was ready to meet Mr Trump, China could not afford to stay on the sidelines.

A cynic — even a more open-minded sceptic — would say that the North Korean leader has played the diplomatic game brilliantly. He has bought himself time to develop his ballistic missile programme. And he has muddied the water as regards responsibility for the crisis. When Mr Kim says he wants to discuss de-nuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, what he means is that North Korea retains a right to nuclear weapons for as long as the US has a military presence in South Korea. That is not a trade any US president would be ready to make. But if talks now break down, as old Asia hands are inclined to expect they will, the blame could be shifted to the US.

There is nothing to suggest that Mr Kim’s nuclear ambitions have dimmed. Doctrine in Pyongyang has it that a bomb, and the means to deliver it, are the only sure guarantee against an attempt by Washington to overturn the regime. North Korean diplomats forever remind western counterparts about what happened to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammer Gaddafi. Mr Trump’s threats to overturn the international nuclear deal with Iran only hand further ammunition to Pyongyang.

What Mr Kim wants from talks with the US is recognition as a fully fledged nuclear power. Only when it feels secure will Pyongyang consider arrangements to reduce military tension on the peninsula. American experts differ as to how close the regime is to building a missile that can carry a warhead across the Pacific. But after a long spell when they talked in terms of years, they have begun thinking in months.

So it may well be that the best these various summit meetings (Mr Kim confirmed on Thursday that he will also meet South Korean president Moon Jae-in) offer is the prospect of war deferred. Pyongyang, and perhaps Beijing, may hope that by the time Washington discovers it has been duped, it will have lost its enthusiasm for a conflagration in east Asia. Talk will have turned to containment. Much of the world nowadays shapes its foreign policy for an era beyond Mr Trump. Why should North Korea be any different?

True optimists will see another possibility. They picture negotiations as a poker game. Between them Mr Trump and Mr Xi hold almost all of the high cards. But as long as they are playing against each other, Mr Kim emerges the winner. Change the dynamic of the game and the North Korean leader would be forced to show his hand.

It should have been obvious all along that a settlement would depend first and foremost on a Sino-American understanding. Both nations want Mr Kim to give up the bomb. Mr Trump wields the military might. And Pyongyang is almost totally reliant on Beijing for supplies of energy and food. China, though, is more fearful of regime collapse — with a reunified Korea extending US influence up to the Chinese border — than it is unnerved by the nukes. For his part, Mr Kim wants above all to remain in power.

If there is a way through the tangle, and I am not sure there is, it resides in an Sino-American agreement that jointly underwrites the territorial integrity of North Korea and, awful though it is to contemplate, the security of Mr Kim’s regime. This would be in effect the treaty that was never signed at the end of the Korean war. And, with the joint backing of Beijing and Washington, the offer could be made to Mr Kim in a manner such as he could not refuse.