The question is not whether a president who builds a lasting peace with North Korea deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. Any president who pulls off that herculean feat — Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, experienced statesman or former reality TV star — should without question be honored with humanity's greatest award for peacemakers.
The problem, though, is that many conservatives are jumping at the chance to claim that President Donald Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize even though he hasn't actually achieved peace yet.
What actually happened at the Singapore summit? For all intents and purposes, nothing. Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un met in front of a row of alternating American and North Korean flags, Trump praised his younger counterpart by saying it was an "honor" to meet him and that he expects the two of them to have a "terrific relationship." Both leaders lauded the signing of a "historic" agreement, the details of which weren't released to the public until hours later (though not before much fulsome praise was heaped on it).
The agreement itself seemed to ask for, and receive, many more concessions from the United States than from North Korea. Trump agreed to suspend war games on the Korean peninsula (in return for nothing, it seems), acknowledged that China has relaxed sanctions against North Korea and that he's OK with this and — most important of all — legitimized Kim Jong Un simply by being on the same stage as him. No president had ever previously met with a member of North Korea's despotic Kim dynasty, which to some degree made that nation less than a legitimate actor on the world stage. That's no longer the case.
What did America get in return? A vague promise from North Korea that it would denuclearize the peninsula. This is the latest version of a promise that North Korea has made many times before, on some occasions with strong mechanisms for verifying and enforcing it (such as an agreement under George W. Bush's administration in 2005). On previous occasions, North Korea ultimately violated the agreement and continued developing nuclear weapons and menacing its various neighboring countries. Yet on this occasion — for reasons that have yet to be specified — it is meant to be taken as an article of faith that the Kim dynasty will be true to its word and that the peace agreement will be real and lasting.
Of course, the most obvious reason for these calls for Trump to win the Nobel is that his supporters want the president to be able to claim a major victory. That's what Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had in mind in April when he tweeted that "Donald Trump convinced North Korea and China he was serious about bringing about change. We're not there yet, but if this happens, President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize." Graham repeated that a few days later when he told Fox News that "It may be the first time the Nobel Peace Prize was given and there was mass casualties because I think a lot of liberals would kill themselves if they did that."
Trump has also shamelessly pushed himself forward as a Nobel contender. After South Korean President Moon Jae In declared in April that "President Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize. The only thing we need is peace," it emerged that Trump had asked Moon in January to give him public credit for making peace talks possible between North and South Korea. While it's not clear whether Moon's Nobel comment was also prompted by a presidential request, it certainly stands to reason that Trump's repeated insistence on flattery from foreign leaders could have played a indirect role.
In fairness, the question of whether Trump deserves a Nobel Peace Prize remains to be answered. It relies entirely on whether the Singapore summit and any future bilateral talks between the United States and North Korea yield concrete results. When Salon spoke with two North Korea policy experts back in April — one who worked for Republicans, the other who worked for Democrats — they discussed what exactly it would take for Trump to turn his then-impending talks with Kim into something historic (for good reasons rather than apocalyptic ones).
"The challenge, for President Trump, will be that at the end of the day, even if he goes through with the summit, it's very unlikely that the North Koreans will agree to make significant concessions related to their nuclear program," said Jamie Fly, a foreign policy expert with the German Marshall Fund who served as foreign policy adviser to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio during the 2016 presidential campaign. "Previous administrations have been through this cycle of escalation and negotiations in the past, and it hasn't produced any significant change in the trajectory of North Korea's weapons of mass destruction or its missile programs."
Laura Rosenberger, who served as a foreign policy adviser with Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, expressed concern in April that if the Trump-Kim summit didn't yield lasting results, it could lead to more than just disappointment. "What Trump has done here is put that [meeting] at the front, without a clear sense of what the agenda is, having given up the leverage we would have by the fact of this meeting," she said. "That means the stakes here are extraordinarily high. The consequences of failure are quite significant, in the sense that . . . once you have a meeting at the presidential level, you don't have much runway after that."
Rosenberger continued in a vein that seemed to predict the Singapore summit with some accuracy: "One of the things that worries me is that if there is failure to reach agreement on at least the process moving forward — I can't imagine under any circumstance that they reach meaningful agreement on anything other than broad platitudes at the table — you need agreement on a process to work out these issues after the meeting. If that doesn't come about, given what we have already seen from this administration I think we risk falling off the cliff to a military option."
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