THE NORTH KOREA SUMMIT

Roger C. Kostmayer

With any high stakes competition, smart adversaries try to figure out a game plan that focuses on their strengths and exploits their opponents weaknesses. The North Korean summit is about war and peace and the stakes are high. The anomaly here is that the two countries and their two leaders are dramatically different, but in opposite ways. The US is a big, powerful, prosperous democracy, & NK is a small, starving, isolated nuclear dictatorship; while Trump is an old, unprepared, narcissistic and diplomatically unskilled President (who doesn’t read, listen or have the attention span of a gnat), Kim is young, ruthless and has been preparing for this summit for three generations of his family.

Everyone on earth should want the US and its president to succeed. But, under these circumstances, what strategy can an increasingly uncontrollable president use to overcome his handicaps and leverage our nation’s strengths, especially when the two leaders will meet without subordinates and experts? The obvious, and perhaps sole, answer is for Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo to play the short card by immediately putting our best (and most carefully constructed) offer on the table, wrapped in a bow that implies “take it or leave it”. Essentially, the US, SK and the UN proposal would provide safety, stability, support for greater NK independence (from China and Russia) and economic viability through multilateral cooperation. It would include a Korean War Peace Treaty and guaranteed protection from regime change or foreign aggression.

In return, there would be guarantees of no nuclear or other WMD proliferation, and zero nuclear ICBM capacity or nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula, as defined by the US. This means complete, verifiable and irreversible.

The details and inspection requirements are important, but hopefully this strategy would produce an offer that neither NK nor the world community could refuse. And, as a side benefit, it protects the world from having to watch this President try and learn 3 dimensional chess over night.

Roger C. Kostmayer

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