Despite praise for Tuesday’s “unprecedented” meeting, there were good reasons why previous US administrations had refused multiple requests from North Korean leaders to meet. The results of the Kim–Trump summit so far can be divided into the good, the bad and the ugly.

The words ‘historic’ and ‘unprecedented’ to describe the meeting between President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un are literally true. But there were good reasons why previous US administrations had refused multiple requests from North Korean leaders to meet with the president. Against the historical and strategic backdrop, the results of the Kim–Trump summit so far can be divided into the good, the bad and the ugly.

The ugly

Inverting the order, it is distasteful for the leader of the free world to meet, on equal footing, the leader of one of the most horrific human rights abuser regimes, as documented in chilling detail in AIIA Fellow Justice Michael Kirby’s report for the UN Human Rights Council. Known colloquially in diplomatic circles as shaking hands with the devil in order to make progress on the bigger picture, there is no shortage of precedent for this transactional calculation.

But the praise showered on the ‘very talented’ Kim by Trump at the press conference afterwards, along with the claim that ‘one of the great winners’ from the summit  were the prisoners in North Korea’s gulags, was nauseating. While Trump conceded that the human rights situation in North Korea was ‘rough’, he relativised it by noting: ‘It’s rough in a lot of places, by the way’. The claim of having developed ‘a very special bond’ with a murderous dictator came immediately after the gratuitous insults hurled at America’s closest allies at the acrimonious G7 summit in Canada.

During the press conference following the Singapore Declaration – which, by the way, is neither a deal nor a treaty – Trump gave away still more. Worse, he bought into the narrative peddled by North Korea and China on the causes of the crisis: accepting joint US–South Korea exercises as provocations and announcing that the ‘war games’ will end and that he strongly looks forward to bringing home all 32,000 US soldiers from Korea. Trump may well have shaken the foundations of the US alliance structure in the Asia-Pacific. Japan in particular will be left wondering where to go next for national security.

The bad

The ‘bad’ began with the agreement to hold a summit without first requiring some concrete actions on denuclearisation. This handed Kim the invaluable prize of global legitimacy as the head of a nuclear-armed state who had succeeded in meeting the US president as an equal because he got the bomb. Forget the fact this capacity was acquired illegally.

All the major concessions to Kim were front-loaded while concessions by North Korea will come downstream. All we have now are promises that have been made several times before and serially broken: a summit to begin (instead of ending) the denuclearisation process; efforts to organise reciprocal visits by Kim and Trump to each other; North Korea’s formulation of denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula (meaning also an end to the US nuclear umbrella for Seoul) rather than North Korea’s complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation (the famous CVID so beloved of wonks); establishment of relations with the US; regime security; an end to provocative military exercises, etc.

A deal with Iran with concrete action outcomes – that included stringent international verification and enforcement – has been mothballed because Trump’s bête noir Barack Obama signed it. But a vague promise from North Korea to ‘work towards the complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula’ is a wonderful deal?

Not surprisingly, signs of disagreement have already cropped up. Speaking at a press conference in Seoul in the presence of South Korea’s and Japan’s foreign ministers on 14 June, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that North Korea will not see any sanctions lifted until it has demonstrated ‘complete denuclearisation’. A day earlier, Pompeo had said that it was hoped to achieve North Korean ‘major disarmament’ by 2020 during Trump’s first term in office. Conversely, the US will resume joint military exercises with South Korea if the talks stall.

The unexpected big winner from the summit is China: its roadmap for Korean peace has been effectively endorsed. North Korea is retained as a strategic buffer. China holds pole position to be the key player in the search for a peace regime in a denuclearised Korean Peninsula. A wedge is being driven among US Pacific allies to match trans-Atlantic divisions. Beijing, which accounts for over 80 per cent of North Korea’s trade, is unlikely to revert to strong sanctions. Only it can offer fallback guarantees to the Kim regime and family should the US breach the Singapore Declaration and return to military threats. An end to US–South Korea ‘war games’ will lower the US’ military profile and in turn raise China’s in the Asia–Pacific.

The good

The good lies in the start of a diplomatic process. Sanctions by themselves were a dead end and military strikes are too costly to contemplate. The only hope for a resolution is through dialogue and negotiation that will require mutual accommodation of the wants that are merely desirable, in order to achieve all sides’ bottom lines. Because the nuclear file is the most critical, it makes sense to quarantine this from other troubling aspects of North Korea’s behaviour, much as was done with Iran. The upside of a summit to kick-start the political process is the two leaders have invested their personal prestige and authority and can instruct officials to implement their vision, overcoming bureaucratic and institutional resistance. Should the pugnacious John Bolton seek to sabotage the deal, for example, Trump can simply fire him: that will hardly be news.

Compared to the real fears of a nuclear showdown when Kim and Trump escalated their bellicose rhetoric last year, the series of inter-Korean, Kim-Xi Jinping and US–North Korean summits have already produced a remarkable relaxation of tensions. As Professor Moon Chung-in, special adviser to President Moon Jae-in, notes, the commitment-for-commitment was the easy part; now comes the hard part of matching action-for-action.

Professor Ramesh Thakur FAIIA, a former U.N. assistant secretary-general, is a professor emeritus at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University.

 This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and can be republished with attribution.