President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for North Korea diplomacy

A year ago, the prospect of President Trump being considered for a Nobel Peace Prize would have sent his critics’ heads spinning. Now, if all goes well in U.S. negotiations with North Korea, Trump should be the odds-on favorite for an award he will have truly earned.

The stunning moves towards peace on the Korean Peninsula have generated the Nobel buzz. Resolving the almost seven-decade division — one of the last major vestiges of the Cold War — would be an epochal international event. South Korea's former president Kim Dae Jung was awarded the peace prize in 2000 for simply beginning the process of détente with North Korea. 

Now, the historic summit between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un alone has the makings of a peace prize-worthy effort, because it effectively ended a war that had been frozen since the 1950s. But President Moon went out of his way to give credit to Trump for setting the stage for the meeting. "President Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize. All we need is to bring peace," Moon said, according to the Blue House, Seoul's equivalent of the White House.

Trump indeed deserves much of the credit for the breakthrough in relations. Trump was the first president to explicitly link U.S. trade policy with China to progress on the Korean Peninsula. Previous presidents had compartmentalized these issues, but Trump knows that the art of the deal is based on leverage. North Korea’s economy (such as it is) depends on China, and China’s well-being depends on trade with the United States. Beijing has much less interest in defending the right of its erratic Pyongyang ally to develop highly destabilizing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles than it does in maintaining its global markets. This reality was no doubt the framework for discussions in March between Kim and Chinese President Xi Jinping, when Beijing told Pyongyang that the party was over. 

Trump also made clear the potential consequences of not moving towards peace. Last year saw a series of threats and counter-threats as Kim took the measure of our new president, to see whether Trump was as tough as advertised. North Korea conducted several provocative nuclear and missile tests. Pyongyang threatened to launch missiles towards Hawaii or the U.S. mainland, and said it had the right to down American strategic bombers even outside North Korea’s airspace. In response, Trump said that any North Korean acts of war would “be met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” Defense Secretary James Mattis laconically noted that if North Korea fired missiles towards the United States it would be “game on,” with all that implied.