Sequencing will not work

By Jason Lim

Hand wringing over the sudden end to the much-anticipated summit between President Trump and Chairman Kim in Hanoi follows several well-worn paths. The most common one blamed the Cohen hearing that sucked the media energy out of what was happening in Hanoi and Trump's reluctance to announce anything that would be buried in that Cohen avalanche.

An expansion on this argument is what I call the "Who shot JR?" version. Trump-Kim is a ratings-getter, the thinking goes, but it happened to go up against the "OJ White Bronco chase" this time around. It was just bad luck. So, hold off on moving the plot forward to some unsatisfying conclusion.

Rather, leave it on a cliff-hanger with a sense of heightened tension to prime the ratings for when the show comes back for the next season. In this version, additional North Korean provocations and twitter threats by Trump could actually add to the narrative tension that would be dramatically resolved by a third summit.

More seasoned North Korea watchers mostly blamed the inherent complexity of the negotiations over North Korean nuclear weapons. In a way, they are taking President Trump and North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho's remarks at face value.

Basically, they disagreed over the sequencing between denuclearization steps and sanctions relief. Basically, "you do this, then I'll do this." This is the action-for-action formula that U.S.-N.K. negotiations had been based on since the Agreed Framework in 1994. The problem is figuring out which action and how much action for which action and how much action. And when. This is exactly where the Hanoi summit broke down.

This is not Trump's fault. This is not even Kim's fault. It is time to realize that the sequencing formula does not work. That is because the U.S. fundamentally distrusts the North Korean regime, born out of a repugnance at what it views as a morally bankrupt, corrupt, predatory regime centered on a creepy cult of personality. This distrust often makes the U.S. approach to North Korea schizophrenic, even when a satisfactory sequencing agreement is reached on paper.

Former Clinton administration officials have been quoted as saying that they agreed to the 1994 Agreed Framework (one that successfully stopped North Korea's plutonium production for eight years until the Bush administration scrapped the agreement in 2002) only because they thought that Kim Jong-il's regime would collapse before the U.S. actually had to live up to the obligation to provide heavy fuel and build two light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea.

The Sept. 19, 2005, joint statement where North Korea agreed to abandon "all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs" was similarly undermined by this fundamental distrust and distaste. The statement read, "The six parties agreed to take coordinated steps to implement the aforementioned consensus in a phased manner in line with the principle 'commitment for commitment' and 'action for action."

But even before this agreement was signed, the U.S. Treasury Department froze North Korean assets ($24 million) in Banco Delta Asia under the Illicit Activities Initiative (IAI), basically cutting off the flow of foreign currency into North Korea.

Anyone who knows the heterogenous and often haphazard nature of how the different parts of the U.S. government carry out policies in respective stovepipes would be able to understand how such a thing could happen. North Korea, where everything flows from the top in a single line, was not susceptible to such understanding. North Korea reacted by executing its first nuclear test the following year.

Proponents of the sequencing framework do have a point. In a trustless environment, trust has to be built in increments as each "action-for-action" step gets accomplished. However, the depth of American (and much of the international community) distrust and distaste for the North Korean regime makes the incremental trust-building exercises extremely difficult to sustain.

Even if the president's sincere intent is to implement a deal, each step is an opportunity for other stakeholders in the U.S. government and beyond ― whether it be the Hill, powerful think tanks, Japanese conservatives, South Korean conservatives, human rights activists, etc. ― to derail the implementation process. Any delay or criticism would, in turn, reinforce reactive distrust in North Korean leadership circles, especially in the military. It is a reinforcing circle of distrust that even Trump and Kim would have trouble controlling.

So what is an alternative negotiating framework? The grand bargain.

Sequencing is like treating the symptoms of a disease but leaving the underlying cause to fester. Trump instinctively realized this early on when he pushed for a big deal that would reset the relationship in one fell swoop. Of course, the trouble is figuring out what that means.

But it has got to be bigger than the "denuclearization for normalization" goal that all this sequencing is aimed at. Be imaginative. Question all our assumptions. Figure out what is really important to Kim. Why not talk about reunification, military alliance, historical legitimization, and even democratization?

People will say this is insane. Maybe. But what is truly insane is trying the same thing every time and expecting different results.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.