Not even John Bolton knows what Donald Trump will do on North Korea

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Opinion

Not even John Bolton knows what Donald Trump will do on North Korea

By Kim Beazley

After agreeing to a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump boasted at a fundraiser of his willingness to take risks that Barack Obama and George Bush would not; "Nobody would have done what I did."

Indeed. Either of them could have got a meeting with Kim at the drop of a hat, but neither would have surrendered this crucial American playing card for no return, not without a clear process to denuclearisation of the peninsula.

The meeting would have been the end of the process not the beginning. At a stroke Trump, in the eyes of Kim, has made Kim his equal.

War with North Korea is on the cards for Donald Trump.

War with North Korea is on the cards for Donald Trump.Credit: Bloomberg

But unlike his predecessors, war is on the cards for Trump. And the appointment of John Bolton, a renowned critic of North Korean peace negotiations, as Trump's national security adviser on Thursday will do nothing to diminish that threat.

The meeting, scheduled for May, has been a masterstroke for North and South Korea. North for that near costless concession. South because, in their minds, it has diverted Trump from a catastrophic military initiative.

Palpable South Korean relief was on show when the read-out of a Trump-Moon call recently said: "The two leaders expressed cautious optimism over recent developments and emphasised a brighter future is available for North Korea if it chooses the correct path."

But the price of failure will be very high.

It has been clear from when Trump was elected that he arrived at his pro-military position despite advice of the prospect of heavy casualties in the event of American pre-emption.

Though opposed to military action, Defence Secretary Jim Mattis has indicated he has given the President low-cost options. He does not have confidence however, in that outcome. On the notion of catastrophic damage, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, said last year: "It [pre-emptive war] would be horrific … But it is not unimaginable to have real options to respond to North Korean nuclear capability. What’s unimaginable to me is allowing a capability that allows a nuclear weapon to land in Denver, Colorado … So my job will be to develop military options to make sure it doesn’t happen."

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John Bolton is a critic of North Korean peace negotiations.

John Bolton is a critic of North Korean peace negotiations.Credit: AP

Publicity has been given to one of them, OPLAN 5015, which ostensibly rests not on full-scale conventional war, but on special forces action and precision weapons with the emphasis of strikes on nuclear sites and decapitation of the regime.

US satellite overhead capabilities are immensely superior to public understanding of them but no one is confident this could be done without some North Korean weapons evading detection. In that lies a last desperate throw by the regime and devastation in Japan and South Korea.

Most expert opinion considers the US has a window of time for diplomatic overtures before North Korea develops viable intercontinental ballistic missile capability against the US. It was best put recently by General Patrick O’Reilly, a former director of the US Missile Defence Agency and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council: "When I hear in one or two years they could have an operational capability that could hit Washington ... people are making very, very aggressive assumptions. There’s a lot left to be done before you can assess a credible threat."

It would be wrong to think Trump ignorant of the military capabilities in the region and of the US. Not that he hasn’t thought through the possibility of a serious outcome. Most of his discussion on the matter over the year has been with CIA Director (now nominated Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo. Pompeo’s agency in turn has been heavily engaged with its counterpart in South Korea and to a degree with that in the North.

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Despite Trump’s enthusiasm, Pompeo, notably highly pessimistic on the value of talks with North Korea, would share a broad view of likely failure.

As for Trump's new national security adviser, Bolton told Fox News the talks were "a way to foreshorten the amount of time that we are going to waste on negotiations". In other words, get them out of the way, demonstrate Kim is impossible, get down to military action.

When Bolton was Bush’s United Nations ambassador, his undermining of approaches to North Korea so infuriated deputy secretary of state Rich Armitage that he denied him State Department working documents and intelligence.

Bolton is a savage opponent of the Iran deal and likely of the possibility of a North Korean one.

The problem for all of the cognoscenti, including Bolton, is they don’t know what Trump will do. Trump, according to one wag, is the expert on the "art of the giveaway". That was reflected in his acceptance of the invitation.

Things have gone quiet since the first flurry. The May deadline is receding. The surprised North still has not publicly confirmed the invitation, which was passed on by South Korean negotiators with whom it had dealt. The US does not have a process of steps to disarmament planned out and when carrots will be offered for progress.

Not even a site for talks is yet chosen.

China, South Korea and Japan are convinced Trump means his threats. Does Kim? Is that motivating his albeit personally unannounced policy, with the soft reward of temporary suspension of testing? If it is, is this the old regime trick of playing for time to get their systems perfected? All players on the other side are well aware of the Kim regime's proclivity for deception.

Is this the moment when the regime accepts China’s advice on the road to prosperity—strict party control but a liberalised economic system? Kim’s legitimacy is bound up not just with a nuclear capability to hit the US. It also rests on a well-fed elite and growing popular prosperity. No matter where he is on nuclear capability, that is not going to happen without the end of sanctions. A quick start to negotiations might help here. Nothing more than broad principles could be agreed by May. However, if among them is an early determination of a deep verifiable freeze of North Korean nuclear programs followed by some economic relief and perhaps a suspension of Allied exercises in the South, then something might move, with fears of Northern perfidy allayed by something like the sanctions snap-back entailed in the Iranian agreement.

Certainly, if there is, among Kim’s motivations, an enthusiasm for an economic surge, that will be obvious by how he accepts verification of such a freeze. He could never be trusted to surrender all his weapons but with no capacity to hit the US he will always be deterred from politically using them. On the other side, Trump is desperate for a deal to cement a reputation that he can deliver. While he dare not accept less than a clear process to dismantling, he is unlikely to be as hard-line on concessions as the Pompeos and Boltons would want him.

We need to remember again as this proceeds that American disarming capability is there if the US is prepared to accept, as Trump appears to be, the risk of a high cost. This is a process we need to want to get right. But what a time this is. The US will collapse the Iranian agreement in the next couple of months. Trump has launched a trade war with China and on steel with Japan. He thrives. He has his chaos.

Kim Beazley is a former Labor leader and former ambassador to the United States.

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