The news that President Donald Trump walked away from negotiations with North Korea early and empty-handed led many experts and lawmakers to heave sighs of relief, even as the summit’s abrupt finale raises questions about where things go from here.
Many had worried that the President, eager to score a success and distract from damaging testimony by his former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, would make a deal that endangered America’s national security and possibly decrease the chances of Pyonyang denuclearization.
According to people familiar with conversations among the President’s senior national security officials, Trump told some advisers ahead of the Hanoi talks that he did not want to appear overly thirsty to secure a deal, hoping to prove wrong the myriad analysts who predicted he’d give away the store to demonstrate some type of progress.
But North Korean Foreign Minister Ru Yong Ho offered a contradictory story. “What we proposed was not the removal of all sanctions, but their partial removal,” the North Korean official said, pointing to United Nations sanctions from 2016 and 2017 that “impede the civilian economy and the livelihood of our people.”
In Washington, the anti-climactic end prompted a flood of relief.
“No deal is better than a bad deal,” said Duyeon Kim, a Korea expert at Center for a New American Security. “Lifting key economic sanctions without proportionate denuclearization steps risk losing leverage.”
And even though the odds of success were low, with a mere month for the US team to prepare, many Republicans portrayed the draw as a victory.
“It’s better to walk away than sign a bad deal,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and fierce critic of the Kim regime.
“What he did in Hanoi was the right thing to do — he walked away from a bad deal,” former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum told CNN’s “New Day,” adding that this was “a wonderful moment in (Trump’s) presidency.”
Robert Galluci, a former US negotiator with North Korea, said he thought “the outcome was, potentially, perfect … because things I worried about didn’t happen and things I wanted to happen, did happen.”
The President had claimed that the removal of US troops from South Korea was not on the table, but there were still fears that Trump would change his mind at the last minute. During his post-summit press conference he bemoaned — and exaggerated — the cost of maintaining a US military presence.
Instead, Washington and Pyongyang are now at “a pause,” Galluci said. “There will be continuing efforts to go beyond the place we are at. And this is a fine temporary position we’re at.”
Trump had been advised by senior members of his national security team — including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton — that he should walk away from the talks if they proved unfruitful, according to an official familiar with the summit.
He was cautioned in the days and even hours leading up to the talks that North Korean negotiators were unprepared to budge on their demands on sanctions during pre-summit talks led by Stephen Biegun, the administration’s special envoy.
