SEOUL: US President Donald Trump’s notoriously threatening rhetoric towards nuclear-armed North Korea — which has drawn comparisons with Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of diplomacy — may deserve some credit for bringing Pyongyang to talks, according to analysts.

The two Koreas held their first official dialogue in more than two years this week, agreeing the North would send its athletes to next month’s Winter Olympics in the South and paving the way for further discussions.

The meeting represented a significant improvement after months of confrontation, during which Pyongyang carried out multiple missile tests and by far its biggest nuclear detonation to date.

At the same time Trump was blamed for heightening tensions with his threats to rain “fire and fury” on the North — now the title of an incendiary book on his presidency — and assertions that its leader Kim Jong Un was on a “suicide mission”.

Since Kim inherited power in 2011, North Korea has made rapid progress towards its goal of developing a missile that can deliver an atomic warhead to the United States, which significantly strengthens its negotiating position.

In his new year speech Kim said Pyongyang had accomplished “the great, historic cause of perfecting the national nuclear forces”.

But some analysts now say that despite the hermit state’s achievements and the defiance of its propaganda, President Trump’s chest-thumping provoked real fears within Pyongyang’s elite, pushing them to seek ways to dial down tension.

Alexander Vorontsov, head of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was in Pyongyang for meetings towards the end of last year.

While there, he spoke to officials who “feared that the US was already trying to shape the battlefield for a military operation against the North”, he wrote on Wednesday on the website 38North.

They seemed “truly baffled” that the South was unaware Mr Trump was inching closer to war, Vorontsov said, while “Pyongyang, they maintained, is under no such illusions”.

Trump administration officials have repeatedly said that military action is an option on the table. Washington has held several joint exercises with allies South Korea and Japan this year, and deployed three aircraft carriers to the area at the same time.

There was “growing concern” in Pyongyang, Vorontsov said, that “different elements of a combined arms operation against North Korea are being methodically rehearsed and that ‘zero hour’, as they put it, is not too far away”.

‘Professional wrestling match’

The unpredictable US president is believed by some to be employing the playbook of his predecessor Richard Nixon, whose “madman theory” aimed to scare opponents into concessions by cultivating an image of recklessness.

It was Nixon himself who coined the term, according to his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, whose autobiography quotes the disgraced president describing his intended message as: “We can’t restrain him when he is angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button.” At times, Trump has appeared to echo the approach wholeheartedly.

As his top diplomat sought an opening with Pyongyang in October, the president tweeted: “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man” -- his nickname for Kim.

“Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what needs to be done!” he added.

At the UN General Assembly he raised the prospect the US would “totally destroy” North Korea, prompting Kim to respond with a personal pledge to “surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire”.

“Never before have two leaders in command of nuclear arsenals more closely evoked a professional wrestling match,” wrote a New Yorker columnist at the time.

Go Myong-Hyun, an analyst at the Asan Institute of Policy Studies, said US actions had “instilled considerable fear in Pyongyang unlike in South Korea”.

“So they came to talks to secure strategic space,” he said.

North Korea’s refusal to expand the agenda of Tuesday’s talks was intended to draw out the process “to avoid possible US military action”, Go added.

Despite a handful of agreements, the North Korean delegation did not respond to Seoul’s proposal for talks on family reunion, and said its nuclear and missile programmes — which it says it needs to defend itself — were not up for discussion with the South.

Chaos politics

South Korean President Moon Jae In thanked Donald Trump for his efforts, saying he had played a “very big” role in making the talks possible.

But former secretary of state John Kerry has described Trump’s tweets as creating “chaos politics” and many analysts say that in the long term, the US leader’s approach will be counterproductive.

The president had been “talking to the world’s most dangerous state like a petulant man-child”, Robert Kelly of Pusan National University wrote at the weekend.

“Honestly, Trump just made everything worse, and his rhetoric almost certainly convinced the Kimist elite that going for nukes was wise.”

The 45th president of the United States, though, has no doubts where credit goes for getting the two Koreas together.

“We were the ones,” he told a cabinet meeting on Wednesday. “Without our attitude, that would have never happened.”

Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2018