Nixon: China::Trump: North Korea?

"Who lost China?" was a cry of right wing politicians in my youth.  It referred to the Chinexe Communist victory in their civil war with the Kuomingtaing, which eventually fled to Taiwan to rule there for some decades.  The allegation was that communists and pinkos in the State Department had undermined the the Chiang Kai-shek regime and weakened our support for him.

After the Communists took over the mainland we refused to recognize their regime, and kept them out of the UN.  That was a cornerstone of American foreign policy for 25 years.  No Democratic president or candidate could afford to propose to recognize the Reds, for fear of being "soft" (much like being "soft on crime" in a somewhat later time frame.

Then came Nixon, and Kissinger.  Despite much criticism from the right (Bill Buckley et. al) they were able to recognize China simply because Nixon's history gave him credentials as anti-communist.  Jimmy Carter completed the job of de-recognizing Taiwan and exchanging ambassadors with the People's Republic of China.

I wonder wherher there is a parallel between Trump and Nixon vis a vis North Korea.  As with China, our North Korean foreign policy has been mostly frozen in stone for 65 years. There have been attempts at breakthroughs; Clinton came the closest but he couldn't get enough support to fully carry out his agreement so it teetered and then collapsed, with GWBush finally killing it. 

As with China, there's a vocal group attacking any attempt to normalize relations.  Also as with China, there are geopolitical game-playing reasons not to deal; I mean the idea that a deal undermines policies (non-proliferation and human rights) we generally support and can't be seen to back away from.

Trump in many ways is Nixon's opposite in terms of style and decision making process, but it's possible that he ends up making a poor deal with North Korea, "poor" at least in the view of the policy establishment who've spent their careers on the issues, but a deal which over a period of time turns out to be acceptable to the US and the world.  If "period of time" is less than 18 months, such a deal might be enough to re-elect him.

The Improbability of Sustaining Sanctions on North Korea

I'm no expert in this area, but the Post had an article on Kim's visit to China which caused me to think.

Based on our experience with sanctions against various countries: Iran, North Korea, Russia, etc., I draw this lesson:  to some extent imposing sanctions is a moral cascade--there's a triggering event which gets leaders of countries/the ruling class upset and determined that "something must be done".  The answer is imposing sanctions.  Sometimes the sanctions are more for show, rather like arresting a few prostitutes used to be back in the middle of the last century, or cracking down on gambling in a gin joint in Casablanca.  But sometimes the outrage is enough to support strong sanctions, sanctions that hurt.

This seems to have been the result with Iran before the nuclear deal and North Korea after the tests of long range missiles and the hydrogen bomb.  It's hard, however, to sustain outrage.  It's particularly hard when the leaders who imposed the sanctions, Xi and Trump, are making nice with the leader of the sanctioned company.  The sanctions may be in effect still, but the bureaucrats who have the job of enforcing them aren't going to have their hearts in it.  They know there's not going to be calls from the leader's office asking them "what did you do today to make life hard for North Korea."

The analysis of the Singapore summit has been that Trump didn't give Kim anything which couldn't be reversed in the future, except the first meeting with the US president. But that analysis will be wrong if the sanctions are slowly eroding because of the change of attitude at the top,

Number of Nuclear Test: the Country Which Is Sixth

North Korea, according to this Vox piece.