As US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un prepare to hold a historic summit, experts warn of an increased risk of armed conflict if diplomatic talks fail to produce a nuclear agreement.
Trump and Kim are scheduled to meet on June 12 in Singapore, following a tumultuous 2017 that was marked by escalating tensions and threats of military action over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.
While the summit is seen as a test for diplomacy that could end the standoff, the stakes are high if it does not lead to any progress on limiting the North's nuclear capabilities.
"If the North Korea-U.S. summit fails to conclude in an agreement, war risks will increase, exceeding previous levels, because of another failure of diplomacy," Alison Evans, deputy head of Asia Pacific country risk at IHS Markit, told NBC News.
Experts say the talks could run into trouble because the US and North Korea hold different understandings of what it means for the latter to denuclearize.
"When they fail, it is not just the specific peace process that has failed, it is diplomacy as a strategy that has failed," Bruce Jones, vice president and director of the foreign policy program at Brookings Institution, wrote in an op-ed published on the Nikkei Asian Review.
Once policy-makers decide that political settlements are unattainable, "then the logic of military solutions rises in salience," he added.
"The failure of a summit could substantially discredit the option of diplomacy in the Korean Peninsula, weak as it already is, and put us directly on the pathway to military conflict," Jones noted.
Foreign policy experts are especially worried about the possibility of war since Trump’s hawkish National Security Adviser John Bolton has previously made a case for preemptive strikes against North Korea.
Bolton has suggested that the White House should consider the 2003-2004 “Libya model” in dealing with Pyongyang. That means the North must denuclearize first before the US would make any concessions.
The North has already expressed a willingness to denuclearize, but it will not do so if the US insists on that without any reciprocal commitment, experts say.
So far Washington has failed to give North Korea the guarantee of its security which is Pyongyang's main demand.
If the summit fails, "it may actually bring us closer to war as we will have exhausted all diplomatic options," Victor Cha, a professor and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said at a recent congressional hearing.
Cha warned that there may be a desire for diplomacy with Kim, but "the United States is talking more about military strikes than it ever has done before."
If everything goes according to plan, Trump and Kim will meet at the Capella Hotel on the resort island of Sentosa on Tuesday in the first ever US-North Korea summit.
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