Mick Hartley

Journalist and author Jasper Becker was, I think, the first to alert us to the full horror of the famine that killed over 30 million Chinese at the time of Mao's Great Leap Forward, with his 1996 book Hungry Ghosts. He's also written perceptively about North Korea, with Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea, from 2005. So this latest Guardian piece is well worth reading – A Trump ‘deal’ with Kim Jong-un would only help a despicable regime survive:

The White House says Donald Trump is ready to meet the supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, “by May”, at a time and location yet to be determined. Whether or not a “deal” emerges within two months, the mere fact of a summit breaks all the rules of diplomacy. It delivers legitimacy – the “face” the North Koreans crave. […]

The trouble is that any “deal” with North Korea quickly descends into a system of extortion. That was the fate of the Clinton-era “agreed framework”, whereby North Korea was given food and money. But Pyongyang cheated, by secretly setting up an alternative route towards becoming a nuclear power.

Why would it want to do that? Well, it’s a simple calculation. Ultimately your own nuclear deterrent is by far the best, and possibly only, guarantee of your continued existence. Everything else is just a piece of paper. The North Koreans would rather “eat grass”, observed Vladimir Putin, than give up their nuclear weapons programme. So we could just be seeing a fresh round of the traditional North Korean dance of advancing, pausing to collect bribes, then going nuclear again.

By now the Americans have tried every strategy in the book – bilateral talks, multilateral talks, stepping-stone deals, regime-change bluster, proxy talks via China, sanctions, more sanctions. So it is not surprising that Trump wants to do something more daring. But if the past is a guide, Trump will take credit for “coercive diplomacy”, only to find he comes up well short of the leverage to force change on North Korea.

In doing so he also risks legitimising, and indeed subsidising, one of the most appalling regimes in the world. Ever. So far the Kim family, governing a country of some 20 million, is reportedly responsible for the deaths of 7 million people. A deal with the Kim family could mean ruling out support for any potential internal opposition or an alternative leadership.

So would it be a good thing if Trump did succeed with a “deal”, and the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea survived? Surely not. We owe the North Korean people a way of escaping from this odious regime.