The ‘zero-sum’ games Kim and Trump play

What is really happening here is the gradual acceptance by the US that North Korea is irreversibly a nuclear weapons power, although a small one.

US President Donald Trump (R) and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un shake hands following a signing ceremony during their historic US-North Korea summit, at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa island in Singapore on June 12, 2018. Picture: AFP PHOTO

If the Singapore meeting between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un had been a zero-sum game, Trump definitely lost. But maybe it wasn’t.

Kim got a meeting with Trump on terms of strict equality right down to the number of flags on display, which is a huge boost for his regime’s claim to legitimacy. He persuaded Trump to end America’s annual joint military exercises with South Korea (and even got Trump to call them “war games” and say they were “provocative”, which no US spokesperson has ever done).

And he got Trump to accept North Korea’s deliberately vague language about the “denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”, with no specific reference to North Korea’s nuclear weapons, let alone any talk of dismantling them.

This is light-years distant from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s pre-summit definition of the US goal as “permanent, verifiable, irreversible dismantling of North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction,” which must happen “without delay”.

But this was not really a negotiation. It was a show, staged for the benefit of the two main participants, and they both got what they came for. They were bound to get it, since they had the power to define the meeting as either a success or a failure. Naturally, they said it was a success – but that doesn’t mean it was actually a failure.

All this zero-sum game nonsense is irrelevant to what is really happening here: the gradual acceptance by the US that North Korea is irreversibly a nuclear weapons power, although a small one, and the negotiation of some basic rules for this new relationship between two nuclear powers of radically different size.

Diplomatic and military experts have been saying for years there is no way North Korea will ever give up its nuclear weapons. The country lived on short rations for a generation to get them, and Kim is well aware of what happened to dictators who didn’t have nukes, like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

The experts are right, but they do not see this situation as necessarily a cause for panic. After all, more evenly matched pairs of nuclear powers, like India and Pakistan, or the United States and Russia, have managed to avoid nuclear war for decades.

If North Korea has even a marginal ability to destroy one US city with a nuclear weapon, the US is effectively deterred from using nuclear weapons against it.

North Korea is and will remain totally deterred from attacking the US, because it would be utterly destroyed in a massive American counter-strike. So the deterrence is mutual and relatively stable.

That is the destination the US-North Korean relationship is heading for, because it is the only one that reality permits. Kim is seeking it consciously, although it’s unlikely that Trump has ever thought of it in these terms.

No matter. That’s what Trump is heading for, and by the time he gets there he will undoubtedly think that it was his goal all along. There will be more meetings, probably including a Kim visit to the White House, and the two countries will move slowly towards the mutual deterrence that will define their future relationship.