United States President Donald Trump has accepted an offer of a summit from the North Korean leader and will meet with Kim Jong Un by May, a top South Korean official said Thursday, in a remarkable turnaround in relations between two historic adversaries.
The South Korean national security director, Chung Eui-yong, told reporters of the planned meeting outside the White House, after briefing Trump and other top U.S officials about a rare meeting with Kim in the North Korean capital on Monday.
No serving American president has ever met with a North Korean leader. The U.S. and North Korea do not even have formal diplomatic relations. The two nations remain in a state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice and not a peace treaty, Times reported.
Seoul had already publicised that North Korea had offered talks with the United States on denuclearisation and normalising ties, providing a diplomatic opening after a year of escalating tensions over the North’s nuclear and missile tests. The rival Koreas also agreed to hold a leadership summit in late April.
“He (Kim) expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible,” Chung said. “President Trump appreciated the briefing and said he would meet Kim Jong Un by May to achieve permanent denuclearization.”
Chung did not say where Trump would meet with Kim. The White House said Trump’s meeting with Kim would take place “at a place and time to be determined.”
Fire and Fury
Trump took office vowing to stop North Korea from attaining a nuclear-tipped missile that could reach the U.S. mainland. He’s oscillated between threats and insults directed at Kim, and more conciliatory rhetoric. His more bellicose talk, and Kim’s nuclear and missile tests have fueled fears of war.
Trump, who has ramped up economic sanctions on North Korea to force it to negotiate on giving up its nukes, has threatened the pariah nation with “fire and fury” if its threats against the U.S and its allies continued. He has derided Kim by referring to him as “Little Rocket Man.”
After Kim repeated threats against the U.S. in a New Year’s address and mentioned the “nuclear button” on his office desk, Trump responded by tweeting that he has a nuclear button, too, “but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
Speaking to reporters after the surprise announcement Thursday, a senior Administration official touted the fact that Trump is willing to do what his predecessors would not.
Trump to Kim Jong Un: My nuclear button is bigger, better than N/Korea’s
“President Trump has made his reputation on making deals,” the official said. “Kim Jong Un is the one person who is able to make decisions under their authoritarian, uniquely authoritarian, or totalitarian system, and so it made sense to accept an invitation to met with the one person who can actually make decisions instead of repeating the sort of long slog of the past.”
United States and North Korea feuds before now
It’s not that previous presidents didn’t have the option of meeting with the head of the hermit kingdom. “North Korea has been seeking a summit with an American president for more than twenty years,” Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at Middlebury Institute of International studies tweeted Thursday night. “It has literally been a top foreign policy goal of Pyongyang since Kim Jong Il invited Bill Clinton.”
For starters, the United States is still technically at war with the isolated country: an armistice halted Korean War fighting in 1953, but neither the U.S nor South Korea formally inked a peace deal.
President Bill Clinton didn’t go to meet with Kim Jong Un’s father himself, but eager for a diplomatic win at the end of his presidency, he sent Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for the meeting in 2000. Writing in the New York Times in 2017, Albright recalled, “I held two days of intensive talks, during which [Kim Jong Il] appeared willing to accept more significant restraints on the missile programs than we had expected.” But she continued, “Obviously, if this dilemma were easy to resolve, it would have been settled long ago. The fundamental problem is that the North Korean leadership is convinced it requires nuclear weapons to guarantee its own survival.”
According to Times, when George W. Bush came into the Oval Office soon after, he took a more hardline approach to North Korea, halting the negotiations that began under Clinton and Albright and naming the country part of an “axis of evil” in 2002. In 2006, North Korea tested its first nuclear device.
The following year, Bush reportedly wrote a personal note to Kim Jong Il, “in which he held out the prospect of normalised relations with the United States if North Korea fully disclosed all nuclear programs and got rid of its nuclear weapons,” according to the New York Times. In his last year in office, Bush authorized the removal of North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism (last year, Trump put the country back on the list). He hoped the move would salvage a faltering diplomatic process but ultimately the effort failed.
Although Bush wasn’t successful in denuclearising the country, Bush’s former deputy press secretary Tony Fratto weighed in favourably on Trump’s decision on Twitter Thursday.
“There’s nothing wrong with the meeting, even if the chances of success are exceedingly slim,” he wrote. “Kim & his father have played the freeze game before. But the other options are military strikes, or years (decades?) more of privation for millions of innocents in NK. So talk.”
After Bush, President Barack Obama was open to talks, but never became convinced that North Korea would meet his preconditions or seriously intended to give up its nuclear weapons. “This is the same kind of pattern that we saw his father engage in and his grandfather before that,” Obama said of Kim Jong Un in 2013, who took over the country from his father in 2011 and had been making threats against the U.S. and South Korea. “Since I came into office, the one thing I was clear about was, we’re not going to reward this kind of provocative behavior. You don’t get to bang your spoon on the table and somehow you get your way.” As he was leaving office, Obama reportedly warned Trump that North Korea would be his most urgent foreign policy threat.
Each of the recent presidents before Trump struggled with North Korea, and none was able to get to a point where he felt that the country’s leader would come into a good-faith negotiation where denuclearization was seriously on the table. “To be clear — we need to talk to North Korea,” Lewis explained in a follow-up tweet. “But Kim is not inviting Trump so that he can surrender North Korea’s weapons. Kim is inviting Trump to demonstrate that his investment in nuclear and missile capabilities has forced the United States to treat him as an equal.”
Trump-Kim summit a diplomatic gamble
Trump thinks things will be different for him. Since Trump became president, he and Kim have taunted each other from across the world, with Trump calling Kim “little rocket man,” Kim calling Trump a “dotard,” and the two comparing the size of their proverbial nuclear buttons. But on Tuesday, Trump said he believed North Korea to be “sincere” in showing a willingness to halt nuclear tests. And Thursday night, South Korean National Security Advisor Chung Eui-Yong revealed outside the White House that Trump “would meet Kim Jong-un by May to achieve permanent denuclearisation.”
It’s a risky move. “A Trump-Kim summit is a major diplomatic gamble,” Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for a New American Security, tweeted Thursday. “Talks can be good, but a summit should be a carrot for the end of a satisfactory process, not the beginning. High chance Kim will pocket the optics, show his people and the world he is received as a legitimate head of state, and in the end keep his programs intact.”
North Korea’s Kim Jong Un says engine test is ‘new birth’ of rocket industry
“I’d love to be more optimistic,” Fontaine added. “But we’ve been down similar roads numerous times with North Korea. Is this time different? Unlikely.”
What will be different this time is the fact that a U.S. president is actually sitting down in person with the North Korean leader. And Trump, at least, is betting that will make all the difference in the world.
Meeting will take a lot of preparation
Trump popped his head into the White House briefing room Thursday evening to tell reporters a “major announcement” was coming in just two hours, one that turned out to reverse a position staked out by his own Secretary of State just one day earlier.
But experts say if he is actually going to meet with Kim — still not a certainty — it will take a lot more planning and forethought than that.
In past administrations, experts say it would take extensive preparation and negotiations with multiple agencies to prepare for a meeting like this. Generally, at least the National Security Council, the State Department, the
Department of Defense and the intelligence community would all play a role in coming up with a negotiating strategy.
All of this would be so that “when the two principals met, there was some kind of understanding of what they were going to talk about, what potential agreement they would reach, and a lot of it would be relatively well scripted,” says Jay Lefkowitz, who served as President George W. Bush’s Special Envoy on Human Rights in North Korea.
“He may not actually have a foreign policy apparatus around him that he either trusts or has confidence in,” says Lefkowitz. And “he obviously has supreme confidence, whether it’s misguided or not, in his own negotiating skills.”
The timeline would be short to do all this planning. Republic of Korea National Security Advisor Chung Eui-Yong said last night that the two would meet “by May.” And a senior Administration official said it would happen in “a couple of months” but the “exact timing and place is still to be determined.”
The Trump Administration is considering appointing an outside expert to work as an envoy to North Korea, CNN reports. But for now, according to Axios, the State Department’s Special Representative for North Korea is retiring, there’s no permanent ambassador to Seoul and the assistant secretary for East Asia hasn’t yet been confirmed. In the West Wing, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster is rumoured to be on his way out.
“They’re going to need to really beef up their team,” says Joel Wit, Senior Fellow at US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
As the Trump Administration hammers down its own position and goals for the meeting, traditionally officials below the President would also be reaching out to officials in North Korea and other countries with a stake in the outcome in advance of the summit. South Korea helped broker the meeting and according to the White House, Trump spoke to both Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday and Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday about North Korean strategy and the upcoming talk.
Arranging a summit with North Korea marks a particular challenge, because the U.S doesn’t have formal diplomatic relations with the hermit kingdom.
N. Korea may be preparing missile test ahead of joint drills-reports
“We’re going to have to start talking to them. That’s the point,” says Wit. “They have to have a process of communication and face-to-face communication, and given the short time frame involved, it’s going to have to be pretty intense.”
One immediate question for the U.S. and North Korea to settle: where the summit will be held. Experts have predicted a neutral country, South Korea, the Demilitarized Zone, or even North Korea, if Kim refuses to leave his country.
North Korea will abide by pledge to suspend missile tests
On Saturday, Trump said he believes North Korea will abide by its pledge to suspend missile tests while he prepares for a summit by May with the North’s leader, Kim Jong Un.
Trump noted in a tweet that North Korea has refrained from such tests since November and said Kim “has promised not to do so through our meetings.”
“I believe they will honour that commitment,” the president wrote.
and then