--:-- Sean Rameswaram: All right, Jamal, we're here at Mattress Firm in DuPont Circle, Washington, D.C. We have a great sale going on.
--:-- Jamal: Oh, you do? What's the great sale?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, we have the big deal. What's the big deal?
--:-- Jamal: You can get a mattress under $9.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you have $9 mattresses?
--:-- Jamal: Yes. $9 for the rest of your life? For a month.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For a month.
--:-- Jamal: Yeah. How many months?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can go up to 72 months.
--:-- Jamal: Wow. Yes. Okay. Wow. You really have it all here. And you also have it all at mattressfirm.com slash podcast. Using the Q-Pot Co podcast then to get 10% off.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Great. Yeah, that's it.
--:-- Elise Hu: Hi, I'm Elise Hu, solo bureau chief for NPR. The Singapore summit actually happened. You were there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, it happened. I mean, obviously we had some back and forth. The optics of it included a lot of flags, a lot of alternating U.S. and North Korean flags.
--:-- Elise Hu: The two leaders walked out in front of those flags from opposite sides of a corridor and then met in the middle in front of the flag backdrop and shook hands. They held that handshake for about 13 seconds and then they turned to the cameras and then walked together to a corridor to begin a one-on-one meeting that lasted for about 45 minutes with only the two leaders plus their interpreter.
--:-- Elise Hu: And then that expanded. One of those face-to-face meetings with the North Koreans on one side and the U.S. delegation on the other side. The U.S. delegation had Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Trump's one side, an interpreter on Trump's other side, and then Chief of Staff John Kelly on one end and National Security Advisor John Bolton on the other end.
--:-- Elise Hu: And at the end of the summit, the two leaders sat down next to one another and signed a joint agreement. The agreement is only a page and a half long, very short on specifics, but has some top-line pledges that North Korea signed on to with the U.S. president.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: OK, so I saw the statement. I saw their signatures. But what exactly did they agree to? What is in there? What's the content?
--:-- Elise Hu: It's a four-part agreement. The first part committed the U.S. and North Korea to a new relationship. It pledged to sort of end the hostile relationship that has lasted for many decades now.
--:-- Elise Hu: You know, obviously there have been periods of engagement and then periods of hostility. But the two leaders pledged to try and start the road to improving what's been a very difficult and dangerous relationship.
--:-- Elise Hu: The second was that they would join together in working toward a stable peace regime. And when we hear peace regime, what that means is a commitment to try and end the Korean War, which ended in 1953 and only an armistice.
--:-- Elise Hu: This is something that would require China to be involved in. But this agreement basically just pledged to sort of work in that direction.
--:-- Elise Hu: The third part of it had to do with the complete denuclearization. This is the part that the U.S. wanted to see. But we should point out that complete denuclearization is actually more vague than previous agreements that North Korea's regime has pledged to regarding its nuclear program, only to then flout its agreements by continuing to test and advance its program.
--:-- Elise Hu: And then finally, the fourth part is a goodwill gesture. It commits to the repatriation of the remains of the war dead from the Korean War, which killed tens of thousands of Americans and three million Koreans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So if the biggest part of this four-point plan for the United States, at least, is this denuclearization, what exactly does that mean? I mean, it sounds like it just means get rid of all of your nukes, but obviously that's more complicated than it sounds.
--:-- Elise Hu: So the U.S. under the George W. Bush administration and following through the eight years of the Obama administration and now even under the Trump administration has said its position is CVID, which is government speak and an acronym that stands for complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of nuclear arms.
--:-- Elise Hu: CVID remains the ultimate goal of the Trump administration, but previous administrations considered CVID something they wanted to see swiftly. And the concession out of the U.S. administration now is that it's willing to take steps toward denuclearization and see this happen in a phased way.
--:-- Elise Hu: President Trump said, hey, you know, scientifically. I've been watching and reading a lot about this, and it does take a long time to, you know, pull off complete denuclearization. It takes a long time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's a shift from previous U.S. position on what denuclearization looks like.
--:-- Elise Hu: If so much of this has been sort of tried and failed by previous administrations, what's different this time?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Dennis Rodman showed up?
--:-- Elise Hu: Well, Dennis Rodman has showed up to talk with Kim Jong-un, obviously, before, too. But what's different this time is Kim Jong-un as a leader is different. He's very, very different from his rather reclusive and introverted father, Kim Jong-il.
--:-- Elise Hu: You know, Kim Jong-il had never really spoken in public. His voice hadn't been heard because he was really only seen in still images and B-roll video. So tape of him would come out and be on North Korean state media. But not his voice.
--:-- Elise Hu: Kim Jong-un is the opposite. He has pivoted to a statesmanlike role in 2018. We've seen him now in the past two months not only meet with South Korea, their sworn enemy, the leader of South Korea, twice in person.
--:-- Elise Hu: He's also gone to China twice now to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and now has had this big summit that North Korea has always wanted with the leader of the richest most powerful nation on the planet, the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And this has all happened just in the last two months. That what's different. And that what could portend a different result.
--:-- Elise Hu: Kim Jong-un got to stand next to the president of the United States. What did President Trump get out of this?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump made the news when he gave a sprawling hour-long press conference, only the second full press conference of his presidency he gave today after the summit.
--:-- Elise Hu: And during that press conference, he decided to make some news. North Korea, in committing to denuclearization, got from the U.S. in return a security guarantee.
--:-- Elise Hu: So an end to the sort of hostility, but also a guarantee that it wouldn't need a nuclear deterrent. And what that looks like, according to what Trump says, is going to be a suspension of the military exercises, the joint military exercises that have gone on for decades on the Korean Peninsula between South Korea and the United States.
--:-- Elise Hu: They happen annually in March and in August. We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump, in an about face, decided to take the North Korean line. Plus, I think it's very provocative.
--:-- Elise Hu: The U.S. is conceding things and it's conceding something that I really didn't expect it to. And a lot of observers didn't expect it to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These war games, what the president calls, that have been defensive in posture, according to the Pentagon.
--:-- Elise Hu: So the president is going against not just his administration, but many previous administrations that, listen, we just maintain this for a defensive posture.
--:-- Elise Hu: And it's something that we totally have a right to do as, you know, sovereign countries.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It sounds like the United States has more to lose here because it's giving up more. Is that is that the case?
--:-- Elise Hu: Yes. At first glance, it sounds like the U.S. is unnecessarily conceding concrete things where North Korea basically signed on to some diplomatic platitudes.
--:-- Elise Hu: There is going to be a lot of criticism of this agreement in that the U.S. didn't actually secure any practical concessions from North Korea when it had an opportunity to because these leaders were face to face.
--:-- Elise Hu: It's nice to see these photos of all the flags and this handshake. But did human rights abuses come up? I mean, we have to remember that this is Kim Jong-un and he's a brutal dictator, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, he is a despot who heads what's considered the most repressive regime on the planet.
--:-- Elise Hu: We cannot forget that North Koreans have no freedom of movement, no freedom of religion, no freedom of speech, no access to outside information.
--:-- Elise Hu: Human rights groups have considered have called North Korea an open prison. They still maintain prison camps, political prison camps that have been compared to concentration camps.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So human rights groups had really been pushing that the United States bring up these issues.
--:-- Elise Hu: President Trump said. We did discuss it today pretty strongly. They did not spend much time on it compared to the denuclearization issues.
--:-- Elise Hu: We'll be doing something on it. It's rough. It's rough in a lot of places, by the way. Not just there, but it's rough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He did bring it up, but he couldn't do that much about it right now. That's curious.
--:-- Elise Hu: I thought that's what summits were for.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Did President Trump miss an opportunity to get some major concessions?
--:-- Elise Hu: Well, North Korea certainly got a lot out of this. Not only did it secure policy changes from the United States, it also got a rhetorical change from the president actually calling Pentagon exercises provocative and then hoping to draw down U.S. troops on the South Korean peninsula.
--:-- Robin Wright: Hi, my name is Robin Wright. I'm a joint fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and at the U.S. Institute of Peace. I'm a contributing writer to The New Yorker.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's important to remember that we didn't always do this whole international summit thing, right?
--:-- Robin Wright: When was the first one?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, the first 26 American presidents never held a summit.
--:-- Robin Wright: The very first summit was during Woodrow Wilson's presidency, when he went to Europe to help negotiate the terms to end the First World War.
--:-- Robin Wright: And this was a very prolonged negotiation that really redefined the map of the world after World War I, redrew borders, redefined alliances, and tried to set up an international organization in the League of Nations to prevent future wars.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that didn't go so well, huh?
--:-- Robin Wright: Didn't go so well at all. Woodrow Wilson won the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize, and yet the summit for him was a total flop.
--:-- Robin Wright: Congress refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles that Wilson had brokered so laboriously.
--:-- Robin Wright: It led to a period of isolationism that defined foreign policy for the next three presidencies.
--:-- Robin Wright: And the terms of the Treaty of Versailles were so controversial for Germany that there was a tremendous backlash that led to the rise of the Nazi Party.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Was that the next time the United States engaged in one of these international get-togethers?
--:-- Robin Wright: Arguably the most important ones, yes. Franklin Roosevelt held three summits with his counterparts from Britain and the Soviet Union.
--:-- Robin Wright: Never before have the major allies been more closely united, not only in their war aims, but also in their peace aims.
--:-- Robin Wright: And the Yalta summit will be remembered as catastrophic. It was perceived at the time as a great success.
--:-- Robin Wright: It defined Germany's terms for surrender. It again redrew the map of the world. But the United States basically deferred the fate of part of Europe to the Soviet Union.
--:-- Robin Wright: It ceded the Cold War in the divisions that then divided East and Western Europe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We must have been having summits during the Cold War. What were those ones like?
--:-- Robin Wright: One of the most interesting was between John Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 in Vienna, and it was an immediate aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
--:-- Robin Wright: The talks go on for two days. There still appears to be sharp disagreement on Berlin, nuclear testing, and Soviet demands for veto rights in international discussions.
--:-- Robin Wright: Nevertheless, high-level diplomacy has been re-established by the talks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Kennedy reached out to Khrushchev and suggested that they have a meeting. He didn't really have a formal agenda.
--:-- Robin Wright: And it proved to be arguably the most disastrous summit the United States has ever held.
--:-- Robin Wright: Kennedy came very ill-prepared. He thought the suave Bostonian from a wealthy family could charm the burly Russian communist.
--:-- Robin Wright: And it didn't work out that way. At one point during the two-day summit, they were taking a stroll in the garden, and Khrushchev actually wagged his finger at Kennedy.
--:-- Robin Wright: And Kennedy acknowledged afterwards that Khrushchev had savaged him, that it was the worst moment of his life.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The worst moment of his life? That's what he told the media at the time.
--:-- Robin Wright: And it was catastrophic because it empowered Moscow.
--:-- Robin Wright: And within a couple of months, Moscow began building the wall in Berlin.
--:-- Robin Wright: And then a few months later, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis when the Soviet Union deployed missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles off the Florida coast.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island.
--:-- Robin Wright: The purpose of these bases can be none other than to provide a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This summit seems to chiefly be about nuclear weapons. Have we had big, important summits about nukes before?
--:-- Robin Wright: Summits have been particularly important in dealing with arms control.
--:-- Robin Wright: And one of the most interesting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev was initially one of the great failures, but it paved the way for a major success.
--:-- Robin Wright: So the one that failed was in 1986 in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the two leaders came to talk about limiting nuclear arms in the world's two superpowers, then a world that was bipolar and divided during the Cold War by these two massively armed nations.
--:-- Robin Wright: And they both wanted to limit nuclear programs. But it collapsed after two days because Ronald Reagan refused to compromise on his missile defense system, which was known as Star Wars.
--:-- Robin Wright: And there was a sense at the time that it had broken up in failure.
--:-- Robin Wright: And yet what was so amazing about this summit was that the two men walked away from it, recognizing that they actually both wanted to limit nuclear arms.
--:-- Robin Wright: And it led to one of the great successes in arms control a year later when the same Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated a deal that eliminated a whole class of weapons the Intermediate Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.
--:-- Robin Wright: And this provided an inkling that there was change coming in the Soviet Union in 1991.
--:-- Robin Wright: The United States and the Soviet Union brokered the START accord. But it also reflected how long it takes to actually produce an agreement.
--:-- Robin Wright: This took two years of negotiation. But it had been in play in terms of building options, building ideas that had begun in the 1960s.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Looking at all the summits past, what do we know works and what doesn't work?
--:-- Robin Wright: Well, two things that are really important in producing a successful summit are legwork, the kind of homework, having a common understanding of what you're trying to achieve.
--:-- Robin Wright: And secondly, the personal chemistry.
--:-- Robin Wright: And that's in some ways why the summit between Kennedy and Khrushchev was such a disaster.
--:-- Robin Wright: And why Reagan and Gorbachev worked. They actually called each other Ron and Mikhail.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Though my pronunciation may give you difficulty, the maxim is do-ve-yay, no-pro-ve-yay.
--:-- Robin Wright: Trust, but verify.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the importance of this...
--:-- Robin Wright: Every meeting you repeat. You repeat that at every meeting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When it comes to President Trump, it's hard to think of anyone who is, in terms of global counterparts, more unlike him than Kim Jong-un.
--:-- Robin Wright: Trump is a newcomer to politics at the age of 70. Kim is half his age.
--:-- Robin Wright: He's been in power seven years, but his family has ruled in Pyongyang now for seven decades.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Trump is the ultimate capitalist, and Kim is an old-time communist.
--:-- Robin Wright: Okay, so the personal chemistry isn't there, but what about the other half, the legwork?
--:-- Robin Wright: What about the work that several previous presidents have invested in North Korea?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The previous three presidents, Clinton, Bush, and Obama, all made efforts to deal with North Korea.
--:-- Robin Wright: President Clinton engaged in what was called the Framework Agreement.
--:-- Robin Wright: The Bush administration decided to try something different, and they walked away after North Korea was found to be cheating in 2002.
--:-- Robin Wright: And that effort collapsed after 2006, when North Korea tested its first nuclear device.
--:-- Robin Wright: It's now tested nuclear weapons several times. It has ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So the challenge that President Trump faces is far more serious than any of his three predecessors.
--:-- Robin Wright: Earlier administrations got agreements with North Korea. Everything looked like it was the beginning of the end of various weapons programs.
--:-- Robin Wright: But in the end, they all collapsed when it came to negotiating the details.
--:-- Robin Wright: The challenging element is dismantling the program.
--:-- Robin Wright: Whether President Trump is a one-term or two-term president, it is possible that even with a diplomatic success with North Korea, all of its weapons might not be dismantled until after he leaves the White House.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's very complicated. It's not just pulling a plug out of a grenade.
--:-- Robin Wright: We're talking about actually dismantling a nuclear program.
--:-- Robin Wright: The weapons, as well as the facilities and the equipment that go into it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One of the real experts on the subject, a professor at Stanford who's been to North Korea and seen his program, said it could take 10 to 15 years.
--:-- Robin Wright: Isn't there a chance that these deals no longer have the same meaning after what he's been doing to our existing deals in the past few years?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, there are a lot of questions today, given what happened in Quebec, about U.S. credibility and ability to even deal with our allies.
--:-- Robin Wright: There's a lot of concern, I think, among foreign policy analysts about how the United States is portrayed.
--:-- Robin Wright: Does it keep its word when it comes to deals? Can U.S. foreign policy goals change so dramatically from one president to another, or can we stick to our accords?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And of course, that plays out not just during this presidency, But of course, what happens with the next and who wants to engage with us for fear that the next president will undo whatever President Trump did?
--:-- Robin Wright: Robin Wright is a contributing writer to The New Yorker.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram. This is Today Explained.
--:-- Anna: Hi, my name is Anna. I'm 15 and from Maryland.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: and my favorite episode of Today Explained is it's never too late to understand the war in Syria and don't forget to follow Today Explained on Twitter at today underscore explained.
--:-- Jamal: Jamal, here we are at the mattress. Is it worth seeing the cheapest mattress?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Absolutely, yeah. We have all kind of customer comes in.
--:-- Jamal: Yeah. Someone who can afford the $4,000 mattress that charges your phone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And also, I'm guessing a college student.
--:-- Jamal: College student can get for $99 a coin.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can get a mattress for $99?
--:-- Jamal: Yes, absolutely.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How is it? Jabal, tell me the truth. How is it?
--:-- Jamal: It's decent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's decent? Yes, decent.
--:-- Jamal: Fair enough.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. All right, so decent mattresses and much better mattresses, all at mattressfirm.com slash podcast than here in the store.
