Fitzpatrick: North Korea is not serious about verification

On Tuesday, the leaders of the United States and North Korea signed a joint statement in which North Korea committed to take steps towards denuclearization. In the past decades, agreements have also been reached with North Korea in this regard but have failed. However, President Donald Trump claims this time will be different, and the North Korean leader is determined to achieve results. At the same time, Mr. Trump has stated that U.S. sanctions on North Korea will remain in place. In this regard, Radio Farda spoke with Mark Fitzpatrick, Executive Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Washington, and inquired about his initial reaction to today's events in Singapore and the agreement between the U.S. and North Korean leaders. What is your initial reaction to what happened today in Singapore? Well, it was a historic meeting but lacking fundamental content. The agreement was much shorter than existing standards. For example, compared to the agreement regarding Iran, this had almost no content. Is it possible that there are other technical agreements that we are not yet aware of? In any case, experts from both sides have been in discussions for a while. It is clear that they are working on the details, but they have not been able to agree on them. As a result, what we saw from this meeting is all that they could agree on. Trump mentioned several other topics in the press conference that he said were not included in the joint statement. For instance, he said that North Korea would dismantle one of its missile facilities. Therefore, more work is being done, but so far, what they agreed upon is just the four brief points in the statement. Technically, Mr. Trump said several times that once the first step towards denuclearization is taken, there is no turning back. What is your opinion on this? For any disarmament process, it must first be agreed upon what disarmament means. Is the goal just nuclear weapons, or does it also include facilities and fossil fuels? And does it include ballistic missiles and chemical weapons as well? These are details that were not addressed in this statement. Also, regarding international organizations, the U.S. President was asked whether they would take action for verification. North Korea is not a member of the NPT, and the International Atomic Energy Agency is responsible for these verification actions. In your opinion, how can the agency work in this regard? The agency must certainly be involved in North Korea's return to the NPT. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which is also based in Vienna, must be involved in ensuring that no further tests are conducted. The fact that neither of these two organizations nor any experts were invited for North Korea's recent action regarding the destruction of nuclear test tunnels suggests that they are not very serious about verification. Given your experience with previous U.S. agreements with North Korea, how do you think this new agreement differs from the previous ones? There is nothing in this agreement that is better than the agreements of 1994 and 2005. The only positive difference is that this agreement was made by a Republican president, who is not criticized by his party members in Congress. Of course, this also happened in 2005. However, the agreement that year did not last for various reasons. Neither side was really very serious. Immediately after that agreement in 2005, the United States became involved with North Korea over counterfeiting issues and then demanded a level of oversight and verification that was so intrusive that North Korea could not accept it, and North Korea was not serious in turn. I think we will see the same situation this time, and although President Trump and the North Korean leader reached an agreement, its implementation will not happen after both sides lay their requests on the table.