The start of a beautiful friendship? How to assess the Trump-Kim summit, Dominion Post, June 13 2018

OPINION: How should we assess the agreement signed between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un in Singapore on Tuesday? The most important sentences in the short document released after the meeting are worth reviewing.

North Korea "commits to work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula". In return, "President Trump committed to provide security guarantees to the DPRK". We can now declare victory in the campaign on North Korean nuclear proliferation. Or can we?

What's the problem? Conspicuously, there is no mention of the word "verifiable" in the agreement signed on Tuesday. Indeed, just a day before, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared the "ultimate" aim of the meeting to be the "complete, and verifiable, and irreversible, denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula".

In a question and answer session at the post-meeting press conference, Trump expressed little concern with the discrepancy between the agreement and Pompeo's statement. When pressed on the verification of denuclearisation issue, Trump stated that Kim "was very firm that he wants to do this". But this is not enough.

The success of the Singapore agreement will ultimately hinge on three ambitious conditions being met. First, North Korea must be sincere in its wish to surrender nuclear weapons.

Previous agreements that Pyongyang signed have collapsed on precisely this issue. North Korea adhered to the letter of the 1994 US-North Korea agreement, known as the Agreed Framework, by "freezing" its plutonium-based nuclear reactors. At the same time, it violated the spirit of the agreement by running a parallel uranium-based nuclear weapons programme. This was discovered by the Bush administration in October 2002, which then repudiated the Agreed Framework.

The subsequent Six-Party Talks from 2003-09 dragged on and eventually collapsed when North Korea conducted nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009. This confirmed to the sceptics, both in the US and in Japan and South Korea, that they had been right all along, making a subsequent solution even harder to achieve.

Second, North Korean sincerity is not enough. The US also has a major role to play in addressing North Korean, South Korean and Japanese security concerns during the denuclearisation process. Here, the record of US foreign policy is not encouraging.

In recent decades, there has been an astounding lack of acumen towards both allies and adversaries. To take one relevant example, should Washington have been the least bit surprised that Pyongyang responded to being placed on President George W Bush's notorious "axis of evil" list in 2002 by accelerating its nuclear weapons programme? How else was it expected to respond?

Moving forward, is Trump able to abandon his impulsive unilateralism and genuinely incorporate the concerns of his South Korean and Japanese allies on North Korea? Perhaps, but the odds don't look good.     

The obvious risk for Trump is that the Singapore agreement falters, but is technically still in operation. We will then likely have an emboldened North Korea operating in an international environment where US allies are openly questioning Washington's policies and the status of the broader US-based international order.

One wonders what Kim made of the unprecedented division on display between Trump and the other G7 leaders in the runup to the Singapore meeting. If the Trump administration started behaving in ways that threatened North Korea's security, why wouldn't Pyongyang kick nuclear inspectors out, pocket its newly acquired legitimacy, and seek to keep its nuclear weapons?      

Third, a non-nuclear North Korea will have to rely on China to be its security guarantor. That is asking for a lot. States, even those that are allies, do not instinctively trust each other. And North Korea has particular reasons not to trust China. It must be remembered that, against Pyongyang's vehement objections, China established diplomatic relations in 1992 with its adversary South Korea.

Also, on nuclear issues, North Korea has learnt that a shared communist ideology is no guarantee against Chinese sanctions and other forms of pressure. Even as North Korea accelerated its pursuit of nuclear weapons by testing them on six occasions since 2006, Beijing has signed on to successive United Nations sanctions against Pyongyang.

Indeed, there is strong evidence that, beginning in late 2017, China, which constitutes 90 per cent of North Korea's trade, reduced to a trickle its petroleum exports to Pyongyang. This was Beijing's way to pressure the Kim regime to reach an accommodation with the Trump administration.

So, short of these three conditions being met, Kim will be setting himself up for regime change. And for Trump, all it will be is another deal gone bad.

* Nicholas Khoo is senior lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Otago. He specialises in Chinese foreign policy and Asian security.