Do Democrats Despise Diplomacy Now?

There seems to be no interest in diplomacy of any kind with Pyongyang now.

Daniel Larison Aug 20 ∙ Paid

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Matthew Petti comments on the Democratic Party platform’s bizarre attacks on Trump’s foreign policy for not being hawkish enough:

The Democrats' 2024 platform attacks the very idea of talks with North Korea. Trump's approach, the platform says, was "embarrassing the United States on the world stage including by flattering and legitimizing Kim Jong Un, exchanging 'love letters' with the North Korean dictator."

As Petti notes, attacking Trump for negotiating with North Korea is not new for the Democrats, but it is notable that the previous platform did not condemn engagement with Kim as sharply as it did this time. There seems to be no interest in diplomacy of any kind with Pyongyang now. If we look back at the 2020 platform, there was at least some lip service about dplomacy even if it did have denuclearization as the goal. Then again, the Biden administration never made that diplomacy a priority and spent the last three and a half years letting the problem get worse.

Trump brought the U.S. dangerously close to war with North Korea in 2017. That is far more deserving of scorn than his unserious attempts at negotiating, but it goes unmentioned. The alternative to a negotiated agreement is continued tensions and occasional crises, so it is foolish for anyone to disparage diplomatic engagement when it is more likely to improve the situation.

It would be fair to fault Trump for his failure in securing an agreement with North Korea, but that would require first accepting that it is legitimate to talk to them to resolve outstanding disputes. Trump squandered an opportunity to make real progress through negotiations because he insisted on making unreasonable maximalist demands that North Korea was never going to accept. That is the obvious line of attack against Trump’s North Korea policy available to Democratic critics, but they would have to believe in the merits of reaching a negotiated compromise in order to use it.

Some analysts have noticed that the platform no longer explicitly mentions denuclearization and hoped that this means that the party is open to a more flexible arms control approach. The same omission has been a cause for alarm in some quarters in South Korea. I don’t know if the decision to remove language about denuclearization reflects a real change, but the hostility to the idea of talking to Kim would seem to be more important. Like the section on Iran, the North Korea section has been shoehorned into the crude “Biden tough, Trump weak” framing that doesn’t leave room for anything resembling serious policy ideas.

The good news is that the platform doesn’t make many specific commitments about what a future Democratic administration might do, but the hostility to diplomatic engagement with North Korea and its attacks on Trump for not being more hardline are not encouraging. The U.S. and its allies can’t afford to ignore North Korea for another four years while it continues building up its arsenal. Sooner or later, there will have to be a new sustained effort at negotiating with their government. It would be much better for all concerned if the U.S. were led by people that didn’t reflexively reject talking to a hostile government out of some misguided fear that talking is weakness.

© 2024 Daniel Larison
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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