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- If I had not been elected
President of the United States,
we would right now, in my
opinion, be in a major war
with North Korea.
- [Crowd] Yeah.
- I certainly think the President is right
when he says North Korean
behavior has pacified
quite a great deal over the past year.
Our own research at CSIS shows
that whenever the United
States is in a negotiation
with North Korea,
an ongoing negotiation with North Korea,
North Korea does not do
these sorts of things.
They don't test missiles.
They don't do nuclear tests.
That's not just a function
of the Trump administration,
that has been the pattern historically,
going back for over 30 years.
So I think the most important thing is
that this second summit has
to produce tangible results.
And what I mean by that is
the first summit in Singapore
this past summer led to a joint statement
that had a lot of principles
in it, but not real substance.
It was essentially an
agreement on what the outcome
of these negotiations should
be, which is denuclearization
of the Korean Peninsula,
a peace treaty ending the Korean War,
and normal relationships
between the United States
and North Korea.
But there was really no
progress in implementing
any of those principles
in the seven months
after the Singapore Summit.
You know, usually with summits,
you have a lot of prep work
that's done in advance.
Ideally, you want 99% of the
summit outcome negotiated
in advance before the two leaders meet.
So one big challenge is that
that's not going to happen
in this case.
Maybe 30% or less will
be negotiated in advance
before the two leaders step into the room.
The other big challenge,
I think, is trying
to keep everybody on
the US side coordinated.
South Korea right now is
moving much faster in terms
of engagement with North Korea.
Japan has been left behind, right,
'cause the North Koreans
won't talk to them.
And then, Japan's South Korea
relations are extremely bad
right now.
Third challenge has to do with China.
China enables North Korea.
They were being tough on
North Korea towards the end
of 2017, but have really
re-established all their
economic ties with North Korea
and that makes it much
harder for the United States
to get North Korea to do the
things we want them to do.
You know, the President has
a great deal of confidence.
He talks directly to
the North Korean leader,
which nobody else in the
world can say they do,
except maybe the Chinese President.
You know, I think the real
test is whether it actually
leads to an agreement that
we can be happy with, right.
If it does lead to an agreement
that we can be happy with,
then people are going to have
to give the President credit.
However, if it fails, it's
going to look very bad for him,
because this is the one
place in the entire world
that the Untied States is doing diplomacy.
We're in trade disputes around the world.
We're doing other sorts of things.
We're pulling out of conflicts.
But this is the only place
where we're doing diplomacy,
so it's going to be a real test
and it will be written about
as either a huge success
or a massive failure of Trump's diplomacy.
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