Trump’s Retreat From the West
By Maxim Trudolyubov
July 9, 2018
When future generations look back to the first weeks in June 2018, the summit meeting in Singapore between President Trump and North Korea’s president, Kim Jong-un, may well be remembered not so much for its impact on the threat of nuclear war in Korea, but for the dissolution of the West as a unified negotiating team driven by Western values. Along with that came America’s emergence as a go-it-alone superpower, with those values set aside in deference to Russia and China.
Mr. Trump has now secured a second summit meeting, this time with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Scheduled for July 16, after a NATO conference, it is bound to irritate Mr. Trump’s Western allies and even some of his own advisers. Its site, Helsinki, Finland, is about 240 miles from Mr. Putin’s native St. Petersburg. The agenda is unclear, but the course of the Singapore meeting may offer some idea of its path.
Neither China nor Russia was party to the Singapore talks, but both were there in spirit. Mr. Trump seems to have followed a blueprint for a resolution to the Korean conflict that China and Russia proposed a year before.
“The idea is to ensure a double freeze,” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said in an interview with NBC in Moscow on July 21, 2017. “North Korea suspends all their launches and tests, and in response, the U.S. and South Korea reduce the scale of their war maneuvers in the region.”
Indeed, the broad design of his agreement with Mr. Kim does match China’s and Russia’s double freeze. Mr. Kim had been preparing to accept it as early as April, when he suspended nuclear and long-range missile tests. In Singapore, Mr. Trump completed the bargain by offering — apparently to South Korea’s surprise — to suspend the annual American-South Korean war games, calling them “expensive” and “provocative.”
But all the meeting really accomplished was to open the prospect of new and probably lengthy negotiations for a final peace on the peninsula. Achieving that will depend on how the interests of five countries — North Korea, South Korea, China, Russia and the United States — can all be served.
The history underlying this quest is worth pondering.
North Korea and South Korea were created when World War II ended with Soviet troops occupying the northern part of the Korean Peninsula and American troops the south. After North Korea invaded the South in 1950, only to be driven back to China’s border by American-led forces, the fighting didn’t stop until after Chinese troops poured in and restored Communist control in the North.
A person of Mr. Putin’s age and experience cannot help seeing in Korea a likeness to a divided Germany. Having served in East Germany as a K.G.B. officer, Mr. Putin was deeply dismayed at the Soviet Union’s decision nearly three decades ago to give up control of what had been the Communists’ East Bloc. Today, his most powerful narrative of grievance is of the West expanding its institutions — especially NATO — to Russia’s western border. He would surely be loath to see the West achieve a matching situation at its eastern door.
In opening the prospects, however distant, for a reunification of the Korean Peninsula, the Singapore meeting did — at least in appearance — sideline Russia and even China. But was the United States still acting as “the West” in doing so? Or had it also sidelined its own allies, which include South Korea and Japan?
Keep in mind yet another summit meeting — in Canada with the Group of 7 powers, all Western-allied — that immediately preceded the Singapore meeting. Mr. Trump essentially dismantled the collective “West” by throwing that gathering into disarray over tariffs and the Iran nuclear deal. He then flew to Singapore and elevated Mr. Kim to a respectable world statesman.
For decades, the united West saw the Kim dynasty’s totalitarian principality as a murderous anti-Western dictatorship. But if you take away the unity, the values of the West disappear with it. So does any “anti-West.” And persecution on political and religious grounds, abductions of other countries’ citizens, extreme brutality by the North Korean regime and similar issues were conspicuously absent from Mr. Trump’s remarks at a news conference after the talks in Singapore. He said he had raised those subjects with Mr. Kim, but then made it clear that denuclearization had taken precedence over human rights.
For his part, Mr. Putin, speaking to Chinese reporters in Qingdao, called Mr. Trump’s decision to meet Mr. Kim “very brave and mature.” Mr. Putin’s detractors in Russia reacted differently. “The meeting was depressing to watch,” Leonid Volkov, who is active in opposition politics, wrote on Telegram, Russia’s social networking app. “It’s hard to forget that this amenable fatty is the commandant of the world’s largest prison camp,” he said, referring to Mr. Kim.
China was not entirely absent from the lead-up to the Singapore talks. To be sure, Mr. Kim was the first to signal, in March, a willingness to discuss with America the fate of Pyongyang’s nuclear program — an invitation Mr. Trump greeted enthusiastically. But later that month, Mr. Kim traveled to consult President Xi Jinping, and they met again before the summit.
It also is significant that the Singapore agreement’s terms were left vague, and that any detailed discussion that may now follow would have to include China, which accounts for 90 percent of North Korea’s trade volume and most of its energy supplies.
In addition, Beijing and Moscow are wary of the possibility of a future American effort to topple the North Korean regime. Pyongyang’s complete denuclearization in exchange for a guarantee of regime security is derided by some in Moscow as a “Libyan model,” the Russian foreign policy commentator Vladimir Frolov wrote recently. Mr. Kim is of course aware of this view, and Mr. Trump assured him of security.
It is likely that without Mr. Xi’s nod, Mr. Kim would not have met with Mr. Trump. And China may have kept its distance and let the American president steal the spotlight, hoping that a peaceful North Korea colonized by Chinese, Russian and American businesses might emerge and make an American military presence on the peninsula irrelevant.
This is not to suggest that Mr. Trump was doing China’s or Russia’s bidding. He had reasons of his own to want a deal — or the appearance of a deal.
But he was not acting as a leader of a collective West. He was acting alone. And that was enough to make an agreement between him and Pyongyang palatable to China and Russia.
Welcome to the post-Cold War, post-values world. Mr. Trump’s foreign policy vision ignores concerns about other countries’ political structures as long as a deal can be reached. He clearly prefers bilateral deals to multilateral accords. He enjoys politics that are personal rather than institutional.
So his political goals thus align better with those of China or Russia than with Europe’s — or with the postwar policies with which America built long-term strategic partnerships.
Maxim Trudolyubov is an editor at large for the newspaper Vedomosti in Moscow, and editor of The Russia File, a blog published by the Kennan Institute in Washington.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/09/opinion/trump-putin-china-north-korea.html
