Fear: Trump in the White House

The greater Seoul megalopolis was home to approximately 10 million people and went right up to the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividing North and South Korea. North Korea had thousands of artillery pieces near the DMZ in caves. In exercises the North Koreans wheeled the artillery out, practiced shooting and went back into the caves. This was called “shoot and scoot.” Could a U.S. attack deal with so many weapons?

After a month of study, U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon formally reported to Obama that perhaps 85 percent of all known nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons facilities could be attacked and destroyed and that was only the identified ones. Clapper believed the projected success rate would have to be perfect. A single North Korean nuclear weapon detonated in response could mean tens of thousands of casualties in South Korea.

Any U.S. attack could also trigger the North’s potentially devastating artillery, other conventional weapons and a ground army of at least 200,000 and many more volunteers.

The Pentagon reported that the only way “to locate and destroy—with complete certainty—all components of North Korea’s nuclear program” was through a ground invasion. A ground invasion would trigger a North Korean response, likely with a nuclear weapon.

That was unthinkable to Obama. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2009 he said, “War promises human tragedy,” and “War at some level is an expression of human folly.”

Frustrated and exasperated, he rejected a preemptive strike. It was folly.

Informal, backchannel diplomacy between the United States and North Korea continued. Former U.S. government officials met with current North Korean officials to keep a dialogue open. These were most often called Track 1.5 meetings. Government-to-government meetings were called Track 1. If both sides were nongovernment or former officials these meetings were called Track 2.

“We’re has-beens, but they’re not,” in the words of one former U.S. official deeply involved in the Track 1.5 meetings. One meeting had been held recently in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with the vice foreign minister of North Korea. Former U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci said the North Koreans warned him at this meeting, “they will always be a nuclear weapons state.”

A second Track 1.5 meeting with the head of North Korea’s American affairs division followed the 2016 election and took place in Geneva. “The North Koreans don’t take it seriously,” said one former U.S. official, because they know the U.S. representatives can’t propose anything new. “But they’re probably better than not having” the meetings.

Trump had a history of public statements about North Korea, dating back to an October 1999 Meet the Press appearance. “I would negotiate like crazy,” Trump said. In a 2016 campaign speech, he said, “President Obama watches helplessly as North Korea increases its aggression and expands even further with its nuclear reach.” In May of 2016, he told Reuters, “I would have no problem speaking to” Kim Jong Un. As president, in 2017, he called Kim a “smart cookie.”

Without a tenable military option, DNI Clapper thought the U.S. needed to be more realistic. In November 2014, he had gone to North Korea to retrieve two U.S. citizens who had been taken prisoner. From his discussions with North Korean officials he was convinced that North Korea would not give up their nuclear weapons. Why would they? In exchange for what? North Korea had effectively bought a deterrent. It was real and powerful in its ambiguity. U.S. intelligence was not certain of the capability. He had argued to Obama and the NSC that for the United States to say that denuclearization was a condition for negotiations was not working, and would not work.

Also, Clapper said, he understood the North Korean desire for a peace treaty to end the Korean War, which had been formally resolved with an armistice in 1953—a truce between the commanders of the militaries involved, not the nations at war.

The United States needed to understand how North Korea looked at the situation: The U.S. and South Korea seemed permanently poised, dramatically at times, to attack and to do away with the Kim regime.

There was a single argument he made, Clapper said, that the North Koreans had not pushed back on during his 2014 visit. The United States, he had argued, has no permanent enemies. Look, he said, we had a war with Japan and Germany but now are friends with both. We had a war with Vietnam but now we are friends. Clapper had recently visited Vietnam. Even after a full-scale war, peaceful coexistence was possible.

Clapper wanted the U.S. to set up an interest section in Pyongyang. This would be an informal channel in which another government with an embassy in the North Korean capital would act as intermediary. It would be less than full diplomatic relations, but it would give the U.S. a base, a place in the capital where they could obtain information and also get information into North Korea.