Pompeo in Pyongyang

Over Easter weekend, the Washington Post reports, CIA director Mike Pompeo visited North Korea to meet with Kim Jong-un himself. The report credits two anonymous people “with direct knowledge of the trip,” but the story appears to be a deliberate leak rather than an unauthorized one. What to make of it?

The administration has shown a marked tendency to depart from the fruitless conventions of previous administrations on the matter of North Korea. For the first time in decades, the U.S. administration isn’t simply responding to the latest wild antic by the DPRK. For once, the DPRK doesn’t seem to anticipate the administration’s every move and seek to stymie it. The U.S. has never had an effective North Korea policy, or indeed anything that could be called a North Korea policy at all, but the present administration at least seems to want to do something more than placate the Kim regime and hope it behaves itself.

Pompeo’s visit is nonetheless deeply worrying.

The immediate effect of these high-level talks will be to embolden Kim. Negotiations between the U.S. and other world powers always confer legitimacy and prestige on the latter. The Kim regime craves legitimacy and prestige above all else, and by sending one of President Donald Trump’s closest confidantes, the U.S. is giving North Korea what it wants. By agreeing to a meeting between President Trump himself and Kim Jong-un, the U.S. is giving the DPRK even more of what it wants. Kim will see himself as the dominant partner in the exchange, not the United States.

Moreover, by engaging in this diplomatic endgame, premised as it is on the idea that North Korea might willingly “denuclearize,” the administration implicitly signals that it might actually take the Kim regime at its word. There is no point, remember, in negotiations between two regimes that do not acknowledge the other’s right to exist. It’s well known that the Kim regime does not consider the U.S. a legitimate power. By agreeing to negotiate directly with the North Koreans, the U.S. is signaling that it acknowledges the legitimacy of the DPRK.