An Undiplomatic Trump? At This U.N. Meeting, His Aides Fear the Opposite

WASHINGTON — When President Donald Trump made his first visit to the United Nations last year, he ridiculed North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, as a suicidal “rocket man” and threatened to “totally destroy” his country. He also vowed to rip up the Iran nuclear deal, which he called an “embarrassment to the United States.”

This week, he returns to trumpet the overture he has since made to the North Korean leader, whom he now calls “very honorable,” despite evidence that Kim continues to build a nuclear arsenal. And while he has dealt his long-promised blow to the nuclear deal, he has also said he would “always be available” for a meeting with Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani.

For Trump’s advisers, the biggest risk at the U.N. General Assembly this year is the reverse of what it was last year: not that he will be dangerously undiplomatic, but that he will be overly enthusiastic about engagement with wily adversaries.

Far from restraining Trump’s belligerent tendencies, his senior aides are engaged in a quiet effort to avoid a direct encounter with Iran’s leader that he would be unprepared to handle or concessions that they fear could undermine their effort to keep pressure on North Korea.

Either of those scenarios would rattle Trump’s aides, who are uniformly hawkish about Iran and North Korea, and favor squeezing those countries over talking to them. A meeting with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea on Monday also looms large, since Moon is likely to press him to make concessions to keep the talks with Kim going.

“The president is prepared to bluster and threaten, but he also wants to achieve the deal of the century,” said Robert Malley, who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal as an official in the Obama administration.

“With North Korea, it worked because he had a willing partner,” Malley said. “The problem he’s going to face with Iran is that the leaders there believe a meeting would validate his strategy.”

Officials said they were fairly confident that a meeting with Rouhani would not happen, mainly because the Iranians have said they are not interested in one. On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo raised further hurdles, saying the United States had a series of “simple demands” that Iran would have to meet before it was willing to engage, from a halt to missile launches to its “ceasing to be the world’s largest state sponsor of terror.”

Laying out a series of requirements for the Iranians is one thing; controlling the president’s conviction that he can outmaneuver any leader, or strike any deal, is another. A vivid example of these challenges has come in the tangled preparations for Trump to be the chairman of a meeting of the Security Council on Wednesday.

Trump’s first instinct was to make the session all about Iran, listing his demands for what that country must do to negotiate a new nuclear deal, and threatening allies — including Britain, France and Germany, which negotiated the 2015 accord that Trump has disavowed — with harsh sanctions if they do not cut off all commercial ties with Tehran by November.

The British and the Germans, in particular, objected: An Iran-only session, they warned the White House, would starkly illustrate the split in the Western alliance that Trump set in motion by leaving a deal that the Europeans believe is preventing Iran from producing nuclear fuel for weapons. The European Union, in fact, has been threatening to penalize companies that obey Washington’s mandates about cutting off Iran.

At first, their complaints fell on deaf ears, according to a senior European diplomat. But then the White House had a change of heart, led mainly by Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton. As a former ambassador to the United Nations, Bolton recognized that if Iran were the topic of the meeting, Rouhani would be entitled to a seat at the table to respond.

The result was a decision to broaden the agenda to countering proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, rather than simply countering Iran. While it is not clear that White House officials realized it, that was also the focus of the first Security Council meeting led by Barack Obama, in 2009. On Friday, however, Trump confused matters further by saying in a tweet: “I will Chair the United Nations Security Council meeting on Iran next week!”

That prompted queries from the Europeans, who thought the issue was settled. The senior diplomat said White House officials could not explain Trump’s tweet, but urged them to ignore it, assuring them that the agenda for the meeting would be followed.

Rouhani, for his part, is planning to use his time in New York to strike back at the United States and widen the divisions that Trump created when he pulled out of the agreement. On Sunday, he suggested that the United States bore responsibility for an attack on a military parade in Iran that killed 25 people and wounded nearly 70 others.

In meetings with academics, think tank officials and journalists, he is likely to portray Iran as a peaceful nation that reached an agreement with the West and abided by its terms, only to watch Trump walk away.

In an op-ed in The Washington Post published Friday, Rouhani wrote that when Trump renounced the deal, “I could have reciprocated and announced Iran’s withdrawal, which was certain to throw the region into further insecurity and instability.”

But he said he did not take the bait. The Trump administration, Rouhani wrote, “expected a hasty Iranian withdrawal so that it could easily forge an international alliance against Iran and automatically revive previous sanctions. Our action, instead, thwarted such a move.”

It is not clear, however, that Rouhani can sustain that position. Iran’s oil exports are plummeting. European and U.S. firms that announced major investments or sales to Iran are pulling out. U.S. intelligence estimates portray the effects on Iran as devastating and say they are likely to destabilize the Tehran government.

European assessments, according to foreign officials who have read them, indicate that the sanctions are only emboldening the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the hard-line military units that bitterly opposed the deal and are eager to resume their nuclear development.

European officials acknowledge that they have little to offer the Iranians to compensate them for the U.S.-led sanctions, leading some to calculate that over time Rouhani’s assurance that Iran will stay in the deal will crumble under the weight of pressure at home.

Trump’s meeting with Moon is equally complicated. The South Korean leader is pressing him to accept a declaration that would formally end the Korean War, 65 years after hostilities were halted by an armistice. That is a cherished objective for Kim, who views it as a way to end North Korea’s diplomatic isolation.

Trump’s aides have been trying to head off such a gesture, arguing that the United States gave up enough when Trump suspended joint military exercises with South Korea — which he referred to as “war games,” embracing North Korea’s terminology. They fear another concession to Kim would feed the narrative that the North Korean leader is playing Trump.

Kim believes he now has “a sympathetic partner in the White House who held a summit with him against the counsel of his advisers, and agreed to a statement at Singapore, which by all measures was weak and failed to advance the U.S. policy of final, fully verified denuclearization,” Jung H. Pak, a former CIA mission director for North Korea who is now a scholar at the Brookings Institution, wrote last week.

Some U.S. officials fear that Trump may have already committed to sign such a declaration when he met with Kim in June in Singapore. But because there are no comprehensive notes from those meetings, a senior intelligence official said there was no certainty about what Trump said.

Kim is pushing for another meeting with Trump, and the president is receptive. But he is likely to get a message of caution from another source: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, with whom he was scheduled to have dinner in New York on Sunday.

Japan shares the skepticism of White House aides about North Korea. When Abe visited him in Palm Beach, Florida, in April, Trump spoke enthusiastically about an end-of-war declaration. “People don’t realize that the Korean War has not ended,” he said. “It’s going on right now.”

Abe looked on, expressionless.