Between a gift and the message: What does Kim Jong Un really want?

For about a week before the dawn of the new decade, the world — especially the United States and East Asia — was on its edge and for good reasons. The North Korean strongman, Kim Jong Un promised a “Christmas gift” to the American President Donald Trump.

While the world at large believed that Kim was getting ready to set off a nuclear weapons test or perhaps firing off a few long-range missiles, Trump light heartedly believed that the gift could be a beautiful vase from Pyongyang. The vase did not arrive at the White House for Trump to unwrap; instead, Washington and the capitals of East Asia got a New Year message — that North Korea was abandoning a moratorium on nuclear testing and a threat that the world could see a new strategic weapon “in the near future”.

In the view of the North Korean strongman, the rationale for aggressively pursuing strategic weapons is because of the United States’ “gangster-like acts” have dented economic growth of that country. Kim provided few details of his new weapon or plans, but it is the clearest indication that a new round of tensions is in the offing in the Korean peninsula and by extension between Pyongyang and Washington.

For about two years now, Pyongyang has stayed away from conducting nuclear tests or for that matter developed newer missiles as a part of an understanding that came about in the June 2018 Singapore summit between President Trump and Chairman Kim. But the real problem seemed to be how the two leaders or sides interpreted the “denuclearisation” of the Korean peninsula, one of the key takeaways of the first summit. Washington understood this as meaning North Korea to totally give up nuclear weapons, missiles and fissile materials.

Pyongyang has insisted that the United States should also dismantle everything that could launch nuclear weapons in the neighborhood that included ships and submarines. But most importantly Kim was also hoping that the process of denuclearisation would also include the first steps of doing away with crippling sanctions that were hurting North Korea.

Hardliners in the Trump administration were insisting that Kim was merely talking about denuclearisation to have the United States slowly lift punitive measures and the whole thing was going to be a one-way street with Washington ending up with nothing in the bargain.

Kim’s New Year Message on ending the moratorium comes at a very awkward time for Trump especially when the American President was proudly claiming that North Korea’s restraint over the last two years was one of the major achievements of his Presidency.

From starting off with calling Kim as a “little rocket man” to “falling in love” with the dictator, Trump has had three meetings with Kim, in Singapore, Hanoi and North Korea across the demilitarised zone. And from time to time Trump has also promised to unleash fire and fury if things went awry. Kim for his part questioned the sanity of the American President and said that he would “tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire”. And as the rhetoric heated up in December, a senior North Korean official who was the chief nuclear negotiator, Kim Yong-chol called Trump an irritated old man who did not have patience. “As (Trump) is such a heedless and erratic old man, the time when we cannot but call him a ‘dotard’ again may come”, he remarked.

The fact of the matter to North Korea’s ruler is the issue of sanctions that is troubling him most. There is no question of the fact that the reclusive East Asian country is perhaps the most sanctioned nation in the world — by the United States and the United Nations. The punitive measures have crippled North Korea to the point of reducing that country to near starvation and famine several times in the last two decades leaving hundreds of thousands of people dead or on the verge of nothing to eat. Sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy are as old as nation-state relations even as its effectiveness is being debated loudly in the comity of nations.

Sanctions against North Korea have been crippling even as that country can evade them by non-compliant states and third party brokers in the international market relying on cash transactions.

And one criticism has been that to have unanimity at the United Nations, sanctions have deliberately been vaguely worded to not attract a veto of China or Russia. Still, the bottom line to North Korea has been that sanctions have to a large extent dented the economy even if very few elites in the military and their families are left unaffected. And Kim Jong Un is looking at ways to undo the damage that has been in force since the time of his grandfather.

And it is just not the issue of nuclear weapons testing and missile productions that have warranted sanctions — North Korea has been pulled up for also gross human rights violations, international terrorist attacks, cyber warfare, currency smuggling and kidnapping of foreign nationals, to mention a few.

A senior national security official once told this writer that for effective diplomacy to work, one should always allow the other side to walk away with something from the table. And this is precisely not happening in the case of North Korea and the United States. Washington continues to hope that in one fashion or another Pyongyang can be made to abandon its nuclear weapons and arsenal and still leave sanctions in place.

For that matter Kim Jong Un is not unrealisitic or living in a world of his own – he understands that all sanctions against North Korea will not be lifted in one stroke; rather it can happen only in a phased and calibrated way. But the small first step will have to be taken by Washington into impressing Pyongyang that there are indeed tangible benefits for denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. Slow easing of sanctions does not mean opening the flood gates: it comes with a proviso that any violation of the agreed-upon principles would bring with it the sledgehammer. Constantly harping on the dubiousness of the regime in Pyongyang only plays into the hands of skeptics and delays a lasting solution to the region.

Unfortunately for Trump he does not have the luxury of flexibility in an election year. As it is he is tainted for he has been impeached in the House of Representatives with no date in sight for the trial in the Senate. If this is not a source of anger and irritation, nothing else could be.

Further, anything that the President does on North Korea comes under intense scrutiny by Democratic candidates aspiring for their party nomination with denuclearisation of North Korea and retention of sanctions top on the foreign policy agenda and thus leaving Trump with little wiggle room in the process. In aggressively saying that the moratorium is off and he is about to test a new strategic weapon, Chairman Kim is once again sending a message to President Trump – that perhaps this is a time for another conversation, only that it should not be a monologue and single point driven agenda.

(The writer was a former senior journalist in Washington D.C. covering North America and the United Nations.)

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