B.R. Myers Thoughts on the Aftermath of the Trump-Kim Summit

ROK Drop favorite Professor B.R. Myers has posted some thoughts about the Singapore Summit:

Considering how much of the agreement was obviously worked out before the summit — and with how many portents of American weakening — it’s wrong to blame Trump for what happened on the day itself. His buffoonery was mortifying, yes, but edifying too. All he did was act out the hoary conventional wisdom as if on a pantomime stage. The spectacle was a devastating caricature of all our wishful dealings with the North.

As the day unfolded it became clear that, once again, our side had devoted far more attention to event-planning than to ideological reconnaissance. We saw the usual indifference to the question of how the North could justify its existence after disarming. We saw the lie given to our tough-guy rhetoric. We saw a familiar and quintessentially American combination of credulity and condescension.

All this was as old as the nuclear crisis itself. But for once we got it without any dignifying sheen of sophistication. I suspect many observers who professed to be appalled by Trump’s performance were really only lamenting the lack of that sheen. Their criticism of him for not getting more from Kim in writing makes little sense. Either the regime has changed fundamentally or it hasn’t. If it has, it would indeed be counter-productive to impose a series of hurdles that must be jumped over within a certain time. If it hasn’t, no concessions it might commit to paper are going to have any more value than the last ones.  [B.R. Myers]

As always I recommend reading the whole posting at the link, but Professor Myers’ big issue with the Trump administration is that they are viewing North Korea as a failed communist state eager to open up and develop like China.  Myers believe this is wishful thinking if one studies and understands the ideology of the Kim regime.  The very legitimacy of the ruling Kim regime is threatened if it disarms and no longer seeks reunification under North Korean terms.

Professor Myers has been one of the strong advocates of the viewpoint that the overall goal of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is to force the withdrawal of US troops and create a confederation of the Korean peninsula under North Korean terms.  This viewpoint has led to criticism by people who think the nuclear weapons are just to keep the US from trying to militarily remove the Kim Regime and that the North Koreans are not stupid enough to think they can actually unify the peninsula on their terms.

What this viewpoint does not understand is that the Kim regime is not going to seek reunification in a 1950’s like invasion, but rather through a war of skirmishes ending in a confederation on North Korean terms. One Free Korea sums up the Kim regime’s strategy the best in the below analysis:

The fall of Seoul will not end with the crash of tank treads through the Blue House gates, or by renaming Seoul Kim Il-Sung City, but with signatures, handshakes, smiles, clicking shutters, and the praise of editorialists that two warring states “de-escalated tensions pragmatically” by embarking on a “peace process.” The surrender will be too gradual, and the terms too vague, to be recognizable as such. It will have something like the consent of the governed — that is to say, the soon-to-be-ruled — through the assent of elected leaders who will approve a series of easy, lazy decisions to yield to Pyongyang’s calculated confrontations, embarking irreversibly toward the gradual strangulation of free debate, and then, a slow digestion into one-country-two-systems hegemony on Pyongyang’s terms.  [One Free Korea]

Read the whole thing at the link.