Mr President Trump, it's never too late to talk

Donald Trump repeated threats against North Korea as Kim Jong Un was shown in South Korean news footage celebrating this week's missile launch. Photo / AP

Donald Trump needs to pursue diplomatic options in dealing with North Korea, write Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky.

On Thursday, after North Korea fired a missile over Japan, US President Donald Trump announced that "talking to Pyongyang was not the answer". Minutes later, his Secretary of Defence told reporters that "we're never out of diplomatic solutions".

As a presidential candidate, Trump was open to negotiations. "There's a 10 per cent or a 20 per cent chance that I can talk him out of those damn nukes," he said last June. He was right then and wrong now, and not just because talking is better than fighting. There are several reasons he should give diplomacy a chance.

Nothing else is working

Trump inherited a failed North Korea policy from both his immediate predecessors. And while it's not his fault that North Korea became a nuclear power, the tactics that his Administration have assembled to deal with the challenge don't appear to be working. Sanctions have been toughened; China has been recruited to pressure North Korea (and has co-operated up to a point); and Japan and South Korea have been bucked up. Yet Kim Jong Un remains defiant and has shown no interest in negotiations or compromise. There's little to indicate the same course will change his mind. Perhaps nothing will. But the US approach of issuing threats, such as the warning that we're "locked and loaded" to unleash "fire and fury", have led to more North Korea nukes, more missile tests (and likely another nuclear test), an operational ICBM and further rounds of incendiary rhetoric that increase the risk of war through miscalculation.

All options are not on the table

North Korean missile tests do not in themselves pose a threat to the security of the United States or its allies. Only an actual North Korean attack on the US, its allies or American territory would justify the use of overwhelming US military force and garner the support of South Korea, Japan, most countries around the world, and the Congress and American public. Nobody, except maybe the President, thinks that the use of force in a preventive strike against North Korean missiles and test sites is a serious and credible option. The Defence Secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff don't believe it; and neither do Kim or the Chinese. That's because the odds of success for such an attack are low and the risk of North Korean retaliation against South Korean, Japanese and US forces stationed there, which could kill hundreds of thousands and render untold destruction, is high.

To be effective, threats have to be credible to the target of the threat - and threatening to conduct an attack that would have far more serious consequences for the US and its allies than for North Korea is not credible.

Diplomacy should not be afour-letter word

The notion that talking to your enemy legitimises that country's bad behaviour is nonsense. The US over the years talked to plenty of evil leaders, even psychopaths (see Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong), because it served American security interests.

President Donald Trump waves as he steps off Air Force One. Photo / AP

As the hawkish Moshe Dayan, the great Israeli military and political leader said: "If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies." Moreover, the US record of diplomacy with North Korea is not nearly as bad as most Americans think. Under the 1994 US-North Korea Agreed Framework, for example, North Korea closed a nuclear reactor and plutonium reprocessing facility under international inspection and also halted construction of two reactors that, according to US estimates, could have produced enough fissile material for 30 nuclear bombs. The North Koreans subsequently cheated on this agreement, but the history of US-DPRK nuclear diplomacy is one of both countries failing to keep their commitments and missing opportunities to sustain negotiations.

To paraphrase John Lennon, the US needs to give diplomacy a chance. For eight years, the Obama Administration put more emphasis on "strategic patience" - sanctions, pressure and isolation to secure a North Korean commitment to complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation - than on engagement and negotiations with the North. To be fair, the Obama team faced a leadership transition in North Korea beginning in 2011 that added another layer of complexity to engagement with the North. Nonetheless, even after Kim consolidated power and it had become clear that strategic patience was a bankrupt strategy, the Obama Administration remained timid, perhaps even fearful, of negotiating with North Korea. It never really learned the lesson from the negotiations with Iran: Pressure has to be accompanied by outreach.

And it's worth a try

We have no illusions that Kim will give up his nukes or reaffirm a previous commitment he made to denuclearisation. Nukes guarantee Kim's relevance on the world stage and more importantly his survival. And while no US president should formally recognise North Korea as a nuclear weapons state, that is the bitter and unavoidable reality. A Trump-Kim summit now would be a disaster and play into Kim's hands.

Instead, what's required is discreet exploratory discussions between US and North Korean officials, close to and empowered by Kim and Trump, to test what's possible: to identify a way to defuse the current cycle of threats and counterthreats; to break the momentum of North Korea's missile testing programme; to pre-empt or prevent war; and to explore the possibility of some quid-pro-quo that would freeze Kim's missile production and nuclear and missile testing in exchange for sanctions relief, adjusting US military exercises with South Korea to make them less threatening to North Korea, or exploring whether more permanent peace arrangements can be reached to foster security and stability on the Korean Peninsula. There's no reason the US cannot pursue a diplomatic track while at the same time deterring, defending and containing the North Korean nuclear threat to the US and its allies.

The truth is that no one can give Kim what he wants except the US - guarantees of regime survival and acceptance of North Korean sovereignty as an independent state. All of this would need to be co-ordinated with our allies (South Korea and Japan) and China, too. But the stakes are high - the North Korean nuclear challenge is a vital national interest like no other. Jack Kennedy was right: "Let us never negotiate out of fear; but let us never fear to negotiate."

• Richard Sokolsky, a non-resident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was a member of the Secretary of State's Office of Policy Planning from 2005-2015
Aaron David Miller, a vice-president at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, was a former State Department analyst, negotiator and adviser in Republican and Democratic administrations