Denuclearization: The great divide for Kim-Trump summit

SEOUL: The issue at the top of US President Donald Trump’s agenda for his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is also the most complicated - denuclearization. Pyongyang’s decades-long pursuit of atomic weapons and the means to deliver them to the US have seen it subjected to multiple rounds of sanctions by the UN Security Council, US, EU and others, and tensions soared last year as the two men traded personal insults and threats of war. Now after a rapid diplomatic rapprochement they will hold an unprecedented meeting in Singapore.

But despite the positive imagery of recent months - and the global headlines the summit will generate - the gap they will need to breach is a chasm. “It does strike me as very difficult for Kim to give up the only thing that makes him important and that is nuclear weapons,” former US deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told reporters in Tokyo. “The distance from where we are now to where we need to be is measured in years.” Washington is demanding the North give up its weapons in a complete, verifiable and irreversible way (CVID). Pyongyang, for its part, has repeatedly expressed a commitment to the denuclearization of the peninsula, but the phrase is a diplomatic euphemism open to interpretation on both sides and the North has given no public indication of what concessions it might be offering. Instead Kim has - according to Chinese state media reports of his discussion with President Xi Jinping - called for Washington and Seoul to “remove security threats against the DPRK” and take “phased and synchronous” steps in response to its own moves.

The comments are a clear indication that Pyongyang will seek concessions of its own. Early signals from the US suggested Washington expected the North to hand over its arsenal. National security advisor John Bolton’s reference to a “Libya model” infuriated Pyongyang, given that leader Muammar Gaddafi was deposed and killed in a NATO-backed rebellion after abandoning his nuclear program.