Christopher Hill, former US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia HARDtalk

Welcome to HARDtalk. Donald Trump doesn't do diplomacy in any

recognisable form. A clear strategy, a consistent message, they don't

feature in that trump toolkit. It is that he can threaten North Korea

with war why at the same time describing Kim Jong-un as a smart

cookie who it would be an honour to meet. What does it all mean? My

guess is Christopher Hill, a senior US diplomat under three presidents

and the former lead negotiator on North Korea. Good Trump's

unpredictable approach to foreign policy actually work?

-- could trump's unpredictable approach?

Christopher Hill, in Warsaw, welcome to HARDtalk. Thank you very much.

Let's start with the general point about the President and his foreign

policy making style. Admittedly, we only have 100 more days to judge him

on. -- have only had 100 days to judge him on. What you think it is

breaking off the norms in pot -- foreign policy leadership? He is

certainly breaking with the norms in a virtual lack of staff. He has the

Secretary of State, as secretary of defence and there is not much in

between. You get the impression that when he says things, it is really

from his heart or I guess some other place but it's definitely not

considered opinion. That's one thing that is very different. Another

thing that's very different is, and this was a kind of criticism of

President Obama, he didn't really at the time to get to know these

foreign leaders where is Donald Trump has them to dinner and takes

them to Florida, et cetera. It also has a very friendly but you just

really don't have a sense of where it's quite going. I think largely

because he doesn't really know where it's quite going. Let's talk North

Korea. That is obviously one of your special subjects. He famously went

to Pyongyang as the US lead negotiator at a time when you are

desperately trying to find and negotiating way through the nuclear

crisis with North Korea. Donald Trump's style on North Korea is, it

seems, to mix bellicose language with actually signals that is not

that resident has sent about his willingness to meet face-to-face --

president. What do you make of that? First of all, I think he has

understood that North Korea is a top of the charts issue these days. It's

not going away. They are very much focused on developing deliverable

nuclear weapons. I think he understands that during this term of

years that he will quite likely face the American people in Twenty20 and

have to explain what he has done about this North Korean threat. I

think he looks at this as a trip transactional negotiation. He can

get the Chinese to do what other people couldn't get them to do.

Somehow, he can find a sort of formula in negotiations that will

make the North Korean state oh, we can deal with this guy, we can cut

some arrangement with him. He goes into this with a sense, a kind of

thought, that he understands that at a certain level but of course, I

don't think he has ever cracked a briefing book on it or anything like

that and often when he is confronted with facts, he has never really seen

them before. So, we have the odd spectacle of the Chinese President

Xi Jinping talking to him about North Korea and he said, that after

ten minutes of it, he finally understood it, it's a bit more

complicated. He skates on a very thin fact base to be sure. He is

concerned about train to deal with it. He feels there is no one better

than himself to deal with it and that is a concept that frankly have

to be tested. It's an interesting concept but maybe he bases that

impart that people like you worked very hard on their briefing notes

and briefing books and research things very thoroughly and you tried

to deal with North Korea for many years and it has to be said, you

signally failed. So, the trump message seems to be, I have

inherited one heck of a mess from all of these so-called experts and

diplomats that worked on this for 20 years, they got nowhere, I'm going

to try things a little different. I think that's absolutely his view.

There are those of us who did our homework, worked very hard, try to

integrate different elements of our government, elements of strategy,

approached the North Korea is, got them to do certain things in terms

of disabling their plans and tried to give them certain payments in

terms of fuel oil and things like that and ultimately, we were not

able to get a deal because the North Koreans wouldn't allow us to verify

things. So, he looks at all that and say, heck with that, I can just go

in there, seat of the pants and try to solve this. Look, if it works, is

absolutely wonderful that just because it hasn't been solved before

doesn't mean it's going to be solved without cracking a briefing book.

Before we get to the trump approach, and I want to undertake it in a bit

of detail -- Trump, why do you think and I referred already to your

mission in Pyongyang which was in 2007 and your talks with the other

members of the multilateral group trying to fix the North Korean

problem, why, particularly in light of your visit to pond Yang and

meeting the leadership there -- Pyongyang, wide you think that this

carrot stick approach that successive administrations have

tried, why has it failed? I think it's failed, it is failed in the

sense that I think North Korea isn't prepared to give up their nuclear

weapons. We sat down with the North Koreans and said, "What do you want?

What do you want to give up your nuclear weapons? They want a peace

treaty, it got it. Energy assistance, financial assistance,

all of these things we packaged together in a financial agreement

and we put it altogether and at the end of the day, North Korea was not

prepared to have any kind of verification so we had to take their

word for it on whether they were stopping the production of nuclear

weapons and ultimately, that is something we absolutely could not

live with. This, despite numerous meetings in Beijing. Plus, as you

mentioned, I made three trips to North Korea, including going to

their nuclear reactor. At the end of the day, they basically decided they

would rather have nuclear weapons. The question is, can this president,

working with a very familiar elements, China, South Korea, can he

create a situation where North Korea says, "We are better off giving up

our nuclear weapons". Certainly, we were prepared to put whatever they

wanted in the agreement, provided they were willing to give up their

weapons. We were not prepared to kind of look the other way and

pretend they were giving away, giving up their nuclear weapons when

in fact they won't. I think it's a very tall order to get them to do

this. They have new leader, Kim Jong-un, at least his father seemed

to care what the Chinese thought and tried to engage in these

negotiations. Kim Jong-un shows absolutely no interest. Right, well

you negotiated with the Father's team rather than the Sun's. When

Donald Trump says things like, you know, "We could end up having a

major, major conflict with North Korea, absolutely." And when he

sends the warship aircraft carrier groups to the region, when he uses

the bellicose language, how does that go down with North Korean

officials? Well, they are obviously listening very carefully, I'm sure,

to some extent, they are worried he could actually follow through on

some of these things. To another extent, he is trying to be more

bellicose to the North Koreans. He is trying to out North Korea the

North Koreans. They are pretty good at Bella Scott T. -- being

bellicose. They are waiting to see if he was do these things. It's not

just bellicosity. You said that the feeling is, within the next four

years, they really could have a missile system with a nuclear

warhead, that is within the term of the Trump presidency. Is it not the

case that no US president can allow that to happen and if the diplomacy

doesn't yield anything, Beijing can't deliver on getting North Korea

to change tack over the next year or two, there will have to be an

American military intervention, wouldn't it? It's quite possible

that here is a scenario. You launch a pre-emptive strike against the

North Korean nuclear facilities and then the North Koreans retaliate by

launching artillery to the South Koreans who live within artillery

range of North Korea. Once they strike South Korean civilian

centres, then what does the US do? Does the US then retaliate for that

because the South Koreans it certainly will. And then we are into

a second Korean War. That's a pretty big step. That's not something you

want to bluff your way into. You want to be purposeful and talk to

the South Koreans about it. You want to make sure there are no mixed

signals. You want to talk to the Japanese and oh, by the way, you

want to share it with the American people who might not quite the offer

another war right now. There are a lot of things to go into his

decision of whether to launch a pre-emptive strike against the North

Korean facilities, even if he feels it is absolutely something he has to

do to protect the American people. Lets change tack. If we are to avoid

the missiles flying across the sky and the Chinese are going to be a

pretty major part of any diplomatic shift here. Do you see signs, again,

at the Donald Trump style, and we have to remember that President Xi

has already been to Florida hobnobbing with President Trump, do

you see signs that the Chinese, in a sense, are reacting more positively

and proactively to the Trump style than they were to Obama's, on North

Korea in particular? I think that is fair. I think the Chinese like the

decisiveness of Trump. They think they can understand it better. They

didn't know what President Obama meant by strategic patience. They

see this guy getting up and clearly not a very patient individual and

saying that this needs to be resolved, they kind of like the

directness. The problem is what to do about it. The Chinese can clearly

do a lot more in terms of economic sanctions that the question is

whether doing more in the economic sanctions will be enough to get the

North Koreans off their own nuclear train because they are really moving

very fast on that. Frankly, I think the Chinese like working with the

Americans when Americans talk this way even though, I'm sure in the

dead of night, they worry a little about whether President Trump will

follow through on all of these things. Isn't one of the to these

things, isn't your boss, when you are dealing with these things,

George W Bush, the famous axis of Eagle, Trump and his Secretary of

State Rex Tillerson are not doing this and this is from Rex Tillerson,

"We do not seek a collapse of the North Korean regime, we do not seek

accelerated reunification of the peninsular, we are not out to bring

the regime to its knees." -- the axis of evil. It is an important

signal to Beijing. Another reason why the Chinese liked dealing with

the President and Secretary Rex Tillerson. There is no question that

the Trump administration has been very clear about this. Whereas,

during the Bush administration, those statements were similar to

what Congolese Rice would say but not dissimilar to what Vice

President Dick Cheney would say -- Condoleeza. In a sense, they were

clear messages. But we want to see North Korea get rid of their nuclear

weapons, we are not seeking regime change. I want to emphasise that

when we reached an agreement with the North Korean, we explicitly put

that in, that we were looking forward to living peacefully

together with North Korea. We put that very explicitly. So, I'm not

sure that this is necessarily going to solve the problem but I guess it

is a starting point to laying out the North Koreans that it's about

their nuclear weapons. Not trying to change the regime.

A slightly different question related to Donald Trump. On the one

hand he gives the message he is ready to go to war, but he says he

is honoured at the thought of meeting Kim Jong-un and maybe we can

talk when it comes to China. We similarly get talks about China and

they are a currency manipulator and then that is put on the shelf.

Donald Trump says he wants to work side-by-side with China or North

Korea. Sending these mixed signals, contradictory signals, by Twitter,

by TV appearance, does this in any way work in terms of putting your

adversaries off-balance? You know, performance art is part of many

professions, including diplomacy. I think to some extent we have this

reality TV show man engaging in some performance art. It is not a bad

idea to have your adversaries a little off-balance and I think he

has succeeded without. The problem is mixed messages can lead to some

very serious mistakes. So I think it needs to be careful with this stuff.

He was talking about the South Koreans, we want to stand by them,

help them, and then he says, by the way, we want them to pay for the

ballistic missile system we are installing. The pricetag was of the

order of 1 million dollars. The Secretary of Defence had to walk

back the president's comments on that before it created a firestorm

in South Korea. In addition, the president had one point said of

course we also want to finish the US- South Korean trade agreement

which is so terrible. And of course, the South Koreans spent a lot of

time getting go through the National Assembly and getting a lot of

consensus on it and it is the last thing they wanted to reopen.

Sometimes he makes next statements and they worry them because you

never know what the next one is, a serious one, or a blast. It is a

problem because you don't have someone who can go in there and fill

in the various statements. We don't have ambassadors anywhere in the

region. The are no assistant secretaries, undersecretaries. It is

a home-alone crowd. We have to wait for the next statement from the

president and it worries every country. You are a senior diplomat

yourself and when Donald Trump does not appear to respect the importance

and significance of senior diplomats, I can imagine it would

hurt you a bit. Coming back to the wider point, which I want to put to

you, because it seems to be a critique of the foreign

policy-making establishment of which you were a part, Donald Trump's

message, not just on the peninsula, but on a range of things, is that he

inherited a 20 year long failure, a mass. Clinton, Bush, Obama, they did

not really address a host of problems, and so he has to do it

himself. He has got a point, doesn't he? Yes. But every president since

John Adams because George Washington was the first can point to the

predecessor and say I inherited a mess. The question is not whether

you did that, but what you are going to do about it. I think the question

will be what is he going to do about this. Of course these questions are

tough and the wrapping is not easy to explain. But he cannot face the

American people in 2020 and say this is not my fault. I take your point.

But what he can do, and let us get specific on the Middle East, he can

point, at Obama's red line on chemical weapons with Bashar

al-Assad, which would produce an American military response, which of

course, it did not. By Donald Trump actually made good on the motion of

that being a red line. -- but. Frankly, many people criticising

Donald Trump during the campaign in the early days of the presidency,

like former CIA Director, Michael Hayden, are now saying, do you know

what, he handled that really well, and it was an important signal and

an important question he sent with that airstrike on the airfield in

Syria. -- important message. Maybe you will need to reassess. I don't

know about you guys, but many people, including ours, felt it was

a good decision. If Syrians are going to drop chemical weapons on

civilians, the US should go out and hit them and hit them hard on

principle. That is what he did. But I want to draw a distinction between

hitting a Syrian air base and coming up with a political plan going

forward that will address this carnage in Syria in the long-run. I

have seen no effort, really, to address the politics or the

diplomacy of the issue, and no effort to address what Syria should

be when the war ends. I think President Obama failed miserably on

that, but I don't see any renewed effort from President Trump to say,

OK, we are going to lead a diplomatic effort and work with

others and see what we can come up with. Iron men, just whacking the

Syrian Air Force on one of their air bases is not solving the problem.

But it is in saying I will take action when it is merited and I will

drop the Mother Of All Bombs on IS fighters where they are. This is a

man who does things. Obama, frankly, you were his ambassador in Iraq, who

made this happen, he just wanted to get out of Iraq and get out of

Afghanistan and it seems he did not want to use American military force

in any decisive way. Donald Trump, coming back to the point of being

unpredictable, he was decisive. That is the point. That matters. I would

like to say about President Obama, he went after more bad guys with

cruise missiles than anyone in the history of America and set a record

that will be hard to beat. He did go after people. The problem is he did

not want to state in any way that he wanted to stay in the Middle East.

There are two wars in Syria. One is a war of annihilation against

Islamic State. There is no negotiation with those people. We

have to keep going after them and tell we have essentially killed off.

The other issue is the war of succession in Damascus and whether

the United States can work with others, including the Russians, the

Iranians, and maybe the Saudis and others to see if there is a solution

they are. And that is where I think American presidents need to be

judged to find a solution. The Syrian Air Force, hitting them, no

question, it was the right decision. When you come after civilians, we

have to restore deterrence, and we also have to launch punitive raids.

That is what it was, punitive. But we don't have a political goal. That

is what I want to see a man not just whacking people when we're mad at

them. We are almost out of time. In your diplomatic style, you have been

identified alongside Hillary Clinton. Some say you would have

gotten a senior job if she won. But in 3.5 years, would you reflect on

things and say, Donald Trump, much to my surprise, proved to be a much

more effective foreign policy president than I ever thought

possible? I don't rule that out. I think to some extent, he has had a

much sharper focus, especially in dealing with China. We have a lot of

issues with China. Human rights issues. Trade issues. The South

China Sea issues. I think he has very much sharper and the spear and

said we need to put North Korea as a priority. I like seeing priorities

in diplomacy. Coming in with Christmas trees of things you want

and not getting anything done, well, when you set a priority, you have a

better chance of taking care of it. I welcome that approach. My only

concern is that I don't really see the mechanisms by which you can

follow through. Diplomacy is not just showing up, it is following up

as well. I don't really see that. I would like to see him either empower

the foreign service he has got there, or if he needs to bring in

other people, that is fine as well. We need to get on with the task.

America cannot be in retreat. It has to be directly engaged on these very

tough issues. We are out of time now, but, Christopher Hill, thank

you very much for joining me on the show.

We are watching a weather change later this week which will bring

some rain to some areas that have been mainly dry for several weeks.

This is the satellite picture on Monday.