Opinion: Trump-Kim Summit Ignores the Root of Tension with North Korea

Hopes that President Donald Trump and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un’s war of words will remain just that and not evolve into a war of nuclear weapons has never seemed so high.

 

From North Korea’s agreement to end testing nuclear weapons and missiles to plans for a historic meeting between the two leaders, progress in bringing the Hermit Kingdom’s nuclear weapons program to an end increasingly appears to be a possibility.

 

If Trump is able to get “Little Rocket Man,” as he labeled Kim in a tweet, to give up his nuclear weapons, the meeting could go down as the major foreign policy victory of his presidency in much the same way that former President Richard Nixon’s trip to China is one of the highlights of his terms.

 

However, I doubt that North Korea would be willing to give up denuclearization without promises from the U.S. to withdraw troops from the Korean Peninsula or ease sanctions.  Even the Hermit Kingdom’s decision to stop nuclear and missile testing is not necessarily rooted in a desire for goodwill and restoring relations with the West.

 

According to the Washington Post, the Korean Central News Agency, North Korea’s state-run news agency, quoted Kim as saying, “We no longer need any nuclear test or test launches of intermediate and intercontinental range ballistic missiles, and because of this, the northern nuclear test site has finished its mission.”

 

Essentially, Kim said that the results they’d received from the testing were satisfactory to him, so he didn’t see any need to continue testing.  Coupled with this is the fact that Mount Mantap, the mountain under which North Korea conducted its nuclear testing, collapsed due to the extensive tests, giving another reason for the decision to suspend tests, according to Fortune online reporting.

 

Even if North Korea were committed to denuclearization, it would only address one aspect of tensions between North Korea and the West.

 

A denuclearized North Korea might mean that Americans would no longer need to fear nuclear bombs falling on the U.S., but the Kim family would still be in power, exerting its horrific authoritarian regime on the North Korean people.  At a time when relations between the U.S. and the North Korea could arguably be said to be at their peak, the parents of Otto Warmbier, the American student who was arrested and jailed in North Korea and died in America soon after being released, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in a U.S. district court against North Korea on April 26, reminding Americans of the horrors of life in North Korea source.

 

Trump is no stranger to the horrors of the “prison state” the Kim family runs, as he addressed forced labor and other the human rights abuses in North Korea in his address to the South Korean National Assembly in November 2017.  He also recognized North Korean defector Ji Seong Ho at his State of the Union address in January.

 

Furthermore, the Korean Peninsula has historically been a united country rather than two nations artificially divided by Western powers.  If the northern half of the peninsula is denuclearized, it may not be able to attack the southern half with nuclear weapons, but the two Koreas will still be divided.  The pain brought to the people from both sides due to the division will also still exist.

 

These issues will all persist with Kim Jong Un in control of North Korea, even if he doesn’t have nuclear weapons at his disposal.  Denuclearization is the most that could come of Trump-Kim talks, and while it might not be quite as significant as it appears at first, it could be a step in the right direction to getting to the root of North Korea’s troubles: the Kim family.