George Rebane
There’s more to be said about President Trump’s anticipated meeting with NK’s Ugly Fat Kid (aka Kim Jong Un), the murderous dictator who today runs the world’s largest forced labor camp in the world. That Trump got the UFK off the dime and issue an invitation is laudable in itself, and has really miffed all the professional diplomats who for over more than half century have gotten nowhere with that workers’ paradise. Actually, it’s been even less of an accomplishment than that; the pros have gotten us into a situation where today the UFK’s about to get a deliverable nuclear weapon that can reach the continental US.
The big deal now in preparing for the meeting is how do we make sure that Trump doesn’t wind up circling that Bamboozle Barn one more time. Trump’s unorthodox and straightforward approach should work for him in this regard. The conduct of the meeting should be on an announced no-bullshit basis. Everyone knows that America (and others?) want to have the UFK give up his nukes program, and that should be as a precondition for whatever else we are willing to give in return. Rebane Doctrine calls for such negotiations to be done on an open declaration of interests basis (cf the Harvard Negotiation Project).
Our interests are known to the world, but the UFK’s not so much – in fact, he really can’t openly declare them for fear of getting a bullet through the back of his head or worse. (Recall he fed an entire family of a feared high-level muktimuck to hungry dogs in an arena where the rest of the NK leadership was forced to watch.) The UFK knows that he is the most despised human being on earth today, and he’s got a tiger by the tail. He’s finally run into a US leader who may actually launch an attack of black helicopters preceded by a massive fleet of stealthies taking out his SAM installations, followed by a squadron of C-17s dropping MOABs on the artillery positions overlooking Seoul. In any event, he won’t survive such a scenario because then he will more than likely fall in a quick coup led by his generals who will have nothing to lose and everything to gain with his sudden departure. And that kind of thinking defines the UFK’s interests – his own and his family’s survival.
Before following that line of thought, let’s go back to our stance at the upcoming meeting. Ambassador John Bolton on FN outlined a Rebane Doctrine compatible approach. He said we should immediately ask the UFK for the schedule and names of the NK ports to which we will send our transport ships to pick up his nuclear development equipments, nuclear materials, and the critical components of his ballistic missile system. Also, the locations of the places from which the UN/US-inspected removal of said hardware will occur. No small talk, just get right down to business. We should, of course, also be ready to offer the appropriate quid pros that will undoubtedly include removing some sanctions, future deployment of US forces on the Korean peninsula, etc; and these should be outlined publicly in their generalities to indicate how seriously we take this new conversation.
But the real quid pro quo, one that President Trump will offer when the two of them meet with only trusted translators, is the UFK’s personal survival. Trump will offer to extract the UFK, along with a limited entourage and stuff, and take the whole caboodle to a safe country willing to accept him. Such a scenario has been successfully executed in the past with various bad actors. The one that comes to mind is the extraction of Idi Amin Dada from Uganda in 1979. We recall that as president Amin was a ruthless killer of his own people, gratuitously murdering somewhere in the range of 100K-500K Ugandans during his reign. He and family were extracted with Libyan aid, and exiled there for a bit before being accepted and sinecured by Saudi Arabia where he eventually died. Pol Pot, then the concurrent killer of 1M-3M fellow Cambodians, wasn’t able to negotiate an extraction and died or was murdered in the captivity of his successors.
The outlined deal of ‘guaranteed survival’ under the guise of lifted sanctions and food aid would appear to be the most effective approach given the UFK’s youth, his existential situation, and his extremely limited alternatives for a long life.
In the interval, the publicized desiderata from NK should be immediate denuclearization with a feasible path to the potential reunification of the Koreas achieved through peaceful negotiations with a sufficiently demilitarized NK that no longer has the avowed objective or means to invade the south and unify Korea under one communist regime that replicates the fortunes of Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, (soon) South Africa, … . The openly sought target form of governance and economy for a unified Korea should then be that of present-day South Korea.
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