How Corporate Media Are Undermining a US-North Korea Nuclear Weapons Deal
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
By Gareth Porter, Truthout | News Analysis
North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in shake
hands over the military demarcation line upon meeting for the Inter-Korean
Summit on April 27, 2018 in Panmunjom, South Korea. (Photo: Inter Korean
Press Corp / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In an interview with Fox News on April 29, Donald Trump's new National
Security Adviser John Bolton tossed a grenade into the process of planning
for the Trump-Kim summit. "We have very much in mind the Libyan model from
2003-2004," he said in regard to the problem of North Korean
denuclearization. It was a very obvious deliberate effort to provoke a
breakdown in talks between then CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the North
Koreans by invoking an historical episode that would infuriate Pyongyang.
Kim Jong Un took more than two weeks before his government issued a stern
warning to Trump about Bolton's suggestion. In a major statement addressed
to the Trump administration, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan attacked
Bolton's remark as an "awfully sinister move" to impose "the destiny of
Libya or Iraq" on North Korea. And he warned against the "so-called Libyan
model of nuclear abandonment," adding, "We have already stated our intention
of denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and made clear on several
occasions that precondition for denuclearization is to put an end to
anti-DPRK hostile policy and nuclear threats and blackmail of the United
States." Kim was thus making it clear that North Korea was open to giving up
its nuclear weapons but not to giving them away before the United States had
taken steps to assure the regime's security from US attack.
Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo both sought to reassure Kim that
the administration had no intention of imposing a Libyan solution on North
Korea. "The Libyan model isn't a model that we have at all, when we're
thinking of North Korea," Trump told reporters, clearly separating himself
from what Bolton had suggested.
Under the circumstances, one might have expected the corporate media to have
reported that the North Koreans had pushed back against a malicious Bolton
effort to sabotage the summit, and that Bolton had been effectively rebuked
as a result. Instead, however, major news outlets portrayed the North Korean
response as evidence that the Kim regime was backing away from a commitment
to denuclearization and was up to the same old North Korean
political-diplomatic trick of manipulating Trump to gain unfair political
advantage.
In fact, it has now become clear that one major media outlet is allying with
Bolton's position on the summit. On May 20, The New York Times national
security correspondent David Sanger, who has consistently dismissed the idea
of a denuclearization with North Korea, wrote that Trump's aides "have grown
concerned" that Trump "has signaled that he wants the summit meeting too
much." Those same unnamed "aides," Sanger wrote, "also worry that Kim,
seeing the President's eagerness, is preparing to offer assurances that will
fade over time."
The only two officials involved in the maneuvering for influence on Trump's
policy toward the summit are Bolton and Pompeo, and the fear that Trump is
eager for the summit and too prone to accepting "assurances" from Kim are
clearly coming from Bolton, not Pompeo. So, Sanger can be expected to
reflect the views of John Bolton (without attribution) in his coverage of
the North Korea summit over the next few weeks.
Media coverage of the episode has converged on the idea that the North
Korean statement was evidence that Pyongyang is an untrustworthy negotiating
partner for the Trump administration. CNN's Barbara Starr reported the North
Korean response as, "Pyongyang now quickly returning to the classic North
Korean style of provocations and demands, threatening to walk away" from the
summit and seeking "leverage over Trump." Former Obama administration
Pentagon and State Department spokesman John Kirby was then shown calling it
a typical North Korean tactic, "all of a sudden to throw roadblocks or
obstacles or even just to try to renegotiate a better lot for itself at the
table." That remark suggested falsely that the North Koreans had already
accepted a framework that obligated North Korea to disarm unilaterally
before the United States was obligated to do anything by way of compensation
or reassurance.
Brian Todd of CNN referred to the Trump administration's reassurances as a
"sudden and dramatic" change of tone toward the Kim regime and suggested
that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's reference to "Chairman Kim" in his
statement was "bestowing titles on the dictator" and was "raising eyebrows."
Todd also cited "concern about the sincerity" of North Korea's promise to
close its long-range missile test site, because Chinese geologists had found
that the site had partly collapsed. But the segment then went on to show
hawkish nuclear specialist David Albright explaining that another mountain
at the site could still be used in any case. That point effectively
contradicted the network's effort to deny the fact that Kim had made
concessions to Trump in advance of the summit.
CNBC's coverage of the episode sounded remarkably similar to that of CNN.
After referring to the same North Korean Foreign Ministry statement, the
CNBC anchor presented that statement as saying that North Korea "will never
give up its nuclear weapons in exchange for economic trade with the United
States." But Kim Kye Gwan's point was that North Korea would demand security
guarantees as part of a denuclearization deal -- not that it would reject a
deal for denuclearization.
Nevertheless, NBC News national security commentator Jeremy Bash, the former
Department of Defense chief of staff from 2011 to 2013, declared on the
"Today Show" that the North Koreans had just pulled a "classic
bait-and-switch" and were now "going to ask for more concessions."
Completely misrepresenting what the North Korean statement had actually
said, Bash asserted that the North Korean government had just told the Trump
administration, "Basically we'll talk to you, but we ain't giving up our
nuclear weapons."
Bash warned Trump against negotiating with Pyongyang, claiming that North
Korea had cheated on its commitment to the Clinton administration and on an
agreement reached with the Bush administration in 2005 by carrying out its
first nuclear test the following year. But that claim distorted the actual
history of those two past agreements, both of which then-Vice President Dick
Cheney had sabotaged. In fact, the 2005 agreement merely established the
objective of denuclearization of North Korea, and contained no North Korean
commitment to refrain from missile or nuclear testing in advance of the
intended implementing agreement.
CNN and CNBC were both anti-Trump partisan Democratic networks, but their
line on the negotiations reflected a more general antipathy in corporate
news media to negotiating an agreement with Kim Jong Un. That antipathy is
so deeply rooted that when Kim Jong Un proposed direct talks with South
Korea in his New Year's speech, The New York Times chief national security
correspondent David Sanger co-authored a "news analysis" with the Times's
Korea correspondent questioning the whole idea of a North-South dialogue,
arguing that Kim viewed it merely as "an opportunity to develop and
accentuate" what it called a "split" between South Korean President Moon
Jae-in and Trump, and thus a threat to the US-South Korean alliance. We now
know, however, that Trump was not upset with Moon's efforts to work on a
dialogue, but was supportive of it.
The Sanger article also introduced what would become the standard corporate
media argument in 2018 against any US negotiations with the North: Kim would
seek "major concessions" from Washington but wouldn't give up his nuclear
weapons.
After Trump accepted an invitation in March from Kim for a summit meeting,
the corporate media immediately went into attack mode. On CBS's "Face the
Nation," David Sanger again warned about "the erosion of the alliance that
everybody's so worried about." And Sanger declared flatly, "[W]e also know
that the North Koreans have made it very clear they never plan to
denuclearize."
Sanger's ex cathedra judgment soon became a widely shared conclusion -- that
Kim's concept of "denuclearization" could not possibly be acceptable to the
United States. On April 9, The Washington Post published a story headlined
"North Korea's definition of 'denuclearization' is very different from
Washington's." But the story didn't cite a single North Korean statement for
that claim. In fact, the only evidence it evinced for that claim was the
assertion of MIT nuclear strategy expert Vipin Narang that Kim would
"likely" insist on the United States taking down the "nuclear umbrella" over
South Korea and Japan -- the threat to use nuclear weapons in case of
nuclear attack by North Korea.
Narang's argument doesn't hold water: If North Korea were to give up its
nuclear weapons, the United States would certainly have to end its nuclear
threat against North Korea. In fact, the Clinton administration had already
agreed to give up the targeting of North Korea with nuclear weapons as part
of its "Agreed Framework" of 1994.
CNN picked up another variant of the same theme on April 20, claiming that
North Korea was not actually talking about "complete, verifiable,
irreversible dismantlement of the North Korean program" as demanded by the
United States. The article suggested that Kim's reference in China to
"denuclearization on the peninsula" was evidence of a different concept,
citing the argument by US government consultant Joshua Pollack that North
Korea "considered the US's mere presence on the peninsula a nuclear threat"
and would likely demand US withdrawal from South Korea.
But unfortunately for Pollack and CNN, South Korean President Moon had just
reported that same day that Kim Jong Un dropped the demand that the United
States withdraw its forces from South Korea in exchange for
denuclearization. Opponents of the summit like Pollack and CNN were arguing,
in effect, that they knew better than either Moon or Kim Jong Un himself
what Kim's position on the issue of US troop withdrawal really was.
These examples of flagrant misrepresentation of facts and irrelevant and
nonsensical arguments reflect a fundamental problem with the corporate media
as well as the political elites of the United States: They are so wedded to
the interests of the national security state and to the mythology of US
hegemonic power that they refuse to support any diplomatic move that could
result in a change in the military status quo in Northeast Asia.
The power of the media to create a climate of hostility toward diplomacy
enabled Dick Cheney to destroy two previous US deals with North Korea before
they could reach their crucial implementation phases. A central question in
the coming weeks will be whether the corporate media will succeed once again
in creating a political climate that forces the Trump administration to
abandon the only kind of deal that can create an off-ramp from nuclear
confrontation.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Gareth Porter
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian
writing on US national security policy. His latest book, Manufactured
Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in
February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter: @GarethPorter.
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