Todd Bishop
With only one month to go before 2020, US politics will start another election year full of uncertainty. At this point, both parties in the United States have entered the election mode, and the campaign for President Donald Trump has already opened.
As the current president, Trump has a unique advantage in the election. In 2020, he can fully use the convenience of governing to always stand in the center of the arena of the election arena. However, precisely because of the position of the President, any affairs and crisis of the White House will be magnified, and Trump is likely to get into trouble on some diplomatic matters.
It is difficult to break the deadlock in the US-DPRK negotiations
One of Trump’s biggest breakthroughs in diplomacy is the easing of US-DPRK relations, but this process has not progressed smoothly this year. In April this year, after North Korea ’s “Special Gold Club” broke up, North Korea formally set a “dead line” for the United States and asked the United States to provide a new denuclearization plan by the end of 2019. The “new way” for North Korea’s development will be considered.
Recently, US public opinion has paid considerable attention to this “dead line”, and Trump and Stephen Biegun, the United States special representative for North Korea policy, have been under pressure.
On November 27, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs released news that at the invitation of the United States, a Russian Deputy Foreign Minister had a telephone conversation with Biegan to discuss the prospects for the settlement of the Korean Peninsula issue. The US State Department did not disclose details of the conversation.
Earlier, China ’s Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng stated in Moscow on November 25 that China and Russia are committed to advancing the settlement of the Korean Peninsula issue and have worked out a working paper on the North Korean issue, which has been issued to all parties and is seeking comments.
The call between Bigan and Moscow may be related to the working paper proposed by China and Russia. It can be seen that although Bigan was tough on the 20th, saying that “the United States may re-take more provocative measures, which will be an important opportunity for North Korean measures,” the White House is still actively trying to reverse the situation.
At the beginning of October, Kim Myung-ji, the representative of the consultation between Beghan and North Korea, held a long-term meeting, but it ended without results. Since then, the North Korean side has repeatedly stated that unless Washington abandons its “hostile policy” toward North Korea, North Korea will not hold talks with the United States. Since the beginning of this year, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has repeatedly appeared on missile tests and troop inspections, and has been regarded by the United States as a warning of force.
The United States is unwilling to abandon its goal of “comprehensive, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” (CVID) of North Korea. Even if progress is made in the US-DPRK negotiations before the end of the year, I am afraid it will still be delayed. The fruits of the relationship are hard to say.
The distance between Trump’s diplomatic ideals and reality
If there is a breakthrough in US-DPRK relations, it will be a tribute to Trump, and it will not hurt Trump to continue delaying. After all, there is still a long way to go to achieve denuclearization of the peninsula. However, some more urgent and influential diplomatic matters are in danger of becoming Trump’s political burden in 2020.
Trump has promised to eliminate countries’ “unfair” trade practices against the United States, and the resulting trade war situation remains complex. The first phase of the China-US trade agreement has not yet fully taken shape; Trump ’s threat to the EU and Japan ’s auto tariffs has been postponed to mid-November, but the White House still has no official statement on this; the US-Mexico-Canada trade has been reached The USMCA has so far only been ratified by Congress in Mexico.
Since last year, Trump has promised to withdraw troops in Syria and Afghanistan, and bring “American soldiers home.” Now, not only has the United States failed in the Syrian battlefield, but the withdrawal has not yet been completed. US military officials recently revealed that after the withdrawal of U.S. forces in northern Syria, hundreds of U.S. forces in Iraq and Kuwait entered Syria and rejoined the Kurds on November 22.
On the other hand, the negotiations between the United States and the Taliban in Afghanistan are still deadlocked. After the two sides successfully “changed prisoners” recently, the Taliban shot down American helicopters and killed two American soldiers. It is more difficult for Trump to complete Afghanistan’s withdrawal than Syria.
Diplomatic matters that could be bad for Trump in 2020 don’t stop there. The cracks in US-Europe relations in trade disputes and NATO differences are still deepening; Japan ’s and South Korea ’s two major allies in Northeast Asia have almost stopped renewing military intelligence agreements, and Trump ’s request for huge military spending will make The mediation is more complicated; the consequences of the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal will continue to emerge next year … these matters may continue to ferment in 2020.
Trump’s diplomatic campaign promise is to “renew the world’s respect for the United States and stop treating the United States as a fool.” Therefore, after he took office, he started the global “request for money” model and tried to further strategic contraction, which was also in line with his ultimate goal, but his method was too simple and crude, and he did not have enough strategic considerations, which caused him to fail.
Just as he claims “I alone can fix it” on many matters, he also talks too much “big words” in diplomacy, which leads to a serious disconnect between the actual process and his commitment. Although this does not necessarily affect his basic set of elections, it is still against him in the election year. It can be said that picking up the mess in diplomacy will be a task that Trump will need to make great efforts from now until the election.
