Will there be another Trump-Kim summit? Who knows? Will it do any good? No.

Last Friday, I appeared alongside Scott Snyder of the Brookings Institution on the Voice of America’s Washington Talk, hosted by Connie Kim. You can watch the edited interview here (it’s in English, with Korean subtitles):

To prepare for the interview, Ms. Kim asked me some preliminary questions, and gave me permission to publish the answers here:

Q. President Trump said he would have another summit with KJU if he believes it will be helpful. What do you think he means when he says ‘helpful’ to the U.S.?

A. I have a rule against trying to interpret Donald Trump’s impulses, and following that rule has served me well for the last 3 years, 171 days, and 22 hours. Would it be helpful to the U.S. if Kim Jong-un decided to return to talks and make meaningful progress toward nuclear disarmament, reform, and peace? Clearly. Is that remotely likely right now? Clearly not.

Q. Do you think his comments were rhetoric to keep the door open for dialogue or do you think he would really meet KJU again?

A. I don’t automatically assume that Donald Trump’s comments serve some calculated long-term strategy, but anything is possible. In principle, I agree that it’s important to keep the door open to diplomatic resolutions. But let’s not fool ourselves, either—signing an agreement with North Korea isn’t the end of our problems; it’s the beginning of a long, hard negotiation about the many things Pyongyang chooses to do that we can’t tolerate, including the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons technology, counterfeiting, assassinations, cyberattacks, bank fraud, and crimes against humanity. Throwing away your leverage is no way to begin a negotiation like that with someone like Kim Jong-un.

That’s why it’s so critical that sanctions relief—when warranted—must be dispensed carefully and parsimoniously, and contingent on verifiable changes in Pyongyang’s behavior. That’s not just basic logic, it’s a legal requirement under sections 401 and 402 of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016. By then, Congress had already learned from the experiences of 1994 and 2007 that if we throw away our leverage, our negotiation with Kim ends with him walking away with his nuclear program intact.

Q. Many analysts had said KJU wouldn’t come out for another summit unless there was some kind of sanctions relief. Is there room for sanctions relief in the current sanctions regime? (What sanctions are hurting North Korea the most?)

If our goal is to get Kim Jong-un to show up for an election-year photo op where he celebrates Trump’s relaxation of the very pressure needed to disarm him, then by all means, relax sanctions, have a photo op, and let the next president deal with the nuclear crisis and the global metastasis of proliferation that are sure to follow. It won’t take much sanctions relief to get Kim to show up for that. His entire state runs on bribes, shakedowns, and slave labor, so even a small amount of hard currency can buy the few things he needs to import.

But if the goal is to force Kim to make difficult choices between his nukes and maintaining the integrity of his rule by agreeing to a structured disarmament, reform, and peace process, President Trump should do what he hasn’t done since March 2018—enforce the sanctions fully as Congress enacted them, and as he signed them in 2017. It was almost certainly those sanctions that brought Kim back to the bargaining table, after all. Let’s also give Trump some credit for not giving in to the strong temptation to try to yield to Kim’s demand and lift all of the sanctions that really mattered, even if it’s likely that Congress would have blocked that by demanding treaty ratification.

Q. Representatiave Biegun had made clear his visit to South Koreal was not for talks with North Korea but to strengthen ties with Seoul. He had also criticized Choe Son Hui for being “locked in an old way of thinking”. What message is he giving to North Korea?

A. Not everything is necessarily about talks with North Korea. Biegun’s objectives might be to close some of the widening policy differences between the U.S. and South Korea over sanctions enforcement, the resumption of U.S.-Korean military exercises, missile defense, cost-sharing, or other issues that may determine the alliance’s future.

As far as Mr. Beigun’s comments about Ms. Choe go, they’re consistent with a longstanding, bipartisan U.S. policy that the goal of denuclearization talks is denuclearization—not summits, not photo ops, and not sanctions relief for a regime that has done nothing to deserve it. Denuclearization is also one of the goals that both U.S. law and U.N. resolutions require as a prerequisite to sanctions relief. Beigun knows that if he departs from that goal, he’ll face some difficult questions from Congress.

Q. North Korean officials expressed they were not interested in a summit with the U.S. However, as the final decisions are made by KJU himself, what do you think of the possibility of KJU agreeing to another summit?

A. If all we care about is the next summit, rather than what U.S. and South Korean national security interests a summit might actually achieve, it’s always possible to get Kim Jong-un to show up for one, as long as he’s healthy enough to attend.

But based on the reports I’ve read in Rimjin-gang and the Daily NK, Kim was criticized by North Koreans—very quietly, of course—for showing up for three summits without bringing home any sanctions relief. Of course, Kim did get Trump to stall sanctions enforcement. That was a significant gain for Kim, because sanctions have a half-life of between one and two years if we don’t enforce them, but it wasn’t a gain Kim could easily exhibit to his people, either. We’ve exerted enough pressure to darken North Korea’s long-term economic prospects, but we haven’t enforced or targeted that pressure tightly enough to force Kim to make the hard choice to denuclearize or weaken his base of elite support. That means Kim can afford to wait and gamble on President Biden.

Q. Do you expect progress on talks with North Korea? Could another summit be possible before the elections?

A. My guess is that Kim has decided to wait Trump out. He can read a poll as well as you or I can. He won’t want to show up for another summit without the promise of a payday, Congress can make it very hard for Trump to deliver one, and North Korea’s self-imposed isolation over COVID-19 means that he can’t expect much prospect of a short-term economic revival anyway. We may be in for a few very tense months.

As for Trump, I never try to predict what he’ll do next, but historically, tensions between the U.S. and North Korea have been high in presidential election years (when presidents have been either less willing or less able to deliver concessions) and in presidential inauguration years (when Pyongyang tends to test and try to wrong-foot new presidents).

John Bolton’s book may be another factor. It portrayed Trump as a weak and poorly prepared negotiator, mainly interested in seeking political advantage for himself. It probably undercuts any advantage that a summit would gain him this year, unless Kim delivers much bigger concessions than I expect him to. Trump’s critics are already making attack ads with images of him shaking hands with Kim Jong-un. Previous summits made no progress toward disarming Kim. Unless Trump can win significant but unlikely gains, another summit now only makes him look weak and desperate.

Q. A South Korean court ordered KJU to compensate former prisoners of war who spent decades as forced laborers in North Korea. This ruling was the first time a South Korean court claimed jurisdiction over North Korea or issued a compensation order against its leader. What is the significance of this?

Probably less than most observers assume. I have to caution the audience that I’m not a South Korean lawyer; I’ve only had peripheral exposure to its legal system while practicing there as a U.S. Army Judge Advocate. But as a general rule, the precedent of past court decisions is much less important to South Korean judges than American precedents are to American judges. Outcomes in Korean courts depend much more on the subjective views of judges and the unique facts of each case. But like you, I’m keenly interested in how different or similar other decisions will be to this one. For different judges to reach very different results in similar cases would not cast the Korean legal system in a favorable light.

Another question that interests me is how the Moon administration responds to North Korean pressure to influence the outcome of this case and the collection of the judgment. Clearly, this was a result that will embarrass Pyongyang and put Moon in an uncomfortable position. Will his administration, or a closely affiliated group like Minbyun, try to appeal the judgment? Given the Moon administration’s battle with the prosecution over the Ulsan election scandal and Justice Minister Choo Mi-ae’s history of partisanship in that case, will she try to influence the outcome of these cases, too? One can see parallels to the accusations that our own Attorney General has influenced the investigation and prosecution of defendants close to President Trump.

Q. On the heels of this ruling, additional families of South Koreans abducted by North Korea during the Korean War said it will file lawsuits against Pyongyang. How will the first ruling case affect future lawsuits?

A. Again, South Korean courts tend to place relatively little precedential weight on the prior decisions of other courts. The decision we’re talking about now is from the District Court in Seoul, not the Supreme Court. But the fact that a judge decided this case in favor of two plaintiffs, even for the inadequate sum of $17,570 each, must be encouraging to other prospective plaintiffs. That’s the very least they’re entitled to after the endless decades of hell they went through.

Q. While a South Korean court ruled that KJU must pay the two POWs, what is the possibility of them being paid? The organization who represented the two POWs said a possible source is the copyright fees paid by S. Korean media outlets to Pyongyang for using its North Korean state broadcasters’ footage and other materials.

A. That’s an interesting question, but it’s one I’ll have to leave to the Korean lawyers out there. I had suggested on Twitter that these frozen funds could be a source from which to collect the judgments. Within hours, someone replied to my tweet confirming that Mulmangcho, the NGO that represented the plaintiffs, intends to do exactly that. I wish them all the luck in the world.

A second question arises from the fact that this frozen copyright money almost certainly belongs to the Propaganda and Agitation Department, an entity that’s sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council. Releasing those funds to Pyongyang without U.N. approval would be a violation of the sanctions. Remitting them in dollars or Euro would also violate U.S. or EU domestic law. But I don’t read the sanctions as preventing Seoul from allowing a third-party judgment creditor to collect them. After all, the Warmbier family is in the process of doing exactly that now in our legal system.

Q. What kinds of similarities do you find in South Korea’s court ruling and Otto Warmbier’s parents winning a lawsuit against North Korea back in 2018?

The Warmbier decision is based on legal authorities that have no applicability in South Korea, so legally speaking, there are none. From a policy perspective, however, both rulings are the product of courts that are willing to do what few governments have rarely been willing to do—hold Pyongyang accountable for crimes like torture, murder, slavery, and unlawful imprisonment. U.S. and South Korean politicians have been so eager to appease Pyongyang that they were afraid to hold it to the basic standards of humanity—and yet, they seem surprised that Pyongyang’s behavior only gets worse over time.

In her Warmbier v. DPRK opinion, Chief Judge Howell imposed very high punitive damages on Pyongyang, reasoning that smaller judgments weren’t enough to deter it from torturing and killing people. Our politicians and our diplomats could learn a lot from our judges. The Warmbiers’ lawyers are now litigating to trace and collect North Korean funds that U.S. banks may have frozen. I wish them all the luck in the world, too.