North Korea summit: What we want

North Korea was high on the agenda when Foreign Minister Winston Peters met his Australian counterpart Marise Payne in Auckland this month. With a second summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un scheduled for next week, it will likely come up again during talks between Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her Australian counterpart, Scott Morrison, on Friday.

The Korean Peninsula has long been a flashpoint in the Asia Pacific region.

New Zealand and Australia both have skin in the game – New Zealand’s maritime patrol aircraft fly alongside the Australian air force to help implement United Nations sanctions against North Korea. Both countries are also signatories to tough economic sanctions prohibiting a wide range of dealings with North Korea.

Tensions on the Korean peninsula flared two years ago when the rogue nation conducted missile and nuclear tests that demonstrated its ability to launch ballistic missiles beyond its immediate region. The threats extended beyond the United States; North Korea has also threatened Australia with nuclear strikes for ‘‘blindly’’ following America.

Much of the tension was defused following overtures by South Korean President Moon Jae-in, and an historic summit between Trump and Kim at Singapore in 2018 – the first between a sitting US President and the North Koreans. Now, the two leaders are to meet again in Vietnam on February 27-28.

Peters hailed the first summit as bringing potential for ‘‘peace in our time’, but opinion is divided over whether Kim will follow through with denuclearising North Korea. Some observers see his real end game as having the international community recognise North Korea as a nuclear power like India and Pakistan.

Denuclearisation, according to Kim, is likely to mean getting US weapons and troops out of South Korea, which is home to one of America’s largest military bases. The North Koreans also want a peace treaty that finally ends the Korean war, to which New Zealand and Australia both sent troops. There has never been a peace treaty, only an armistice, which means the US and North Korea are still technically at war.

Since the first summit, meanwhile, there has been little progress toward denuclearisation by North Korea and it is yet to meet the international community’s demand for full, final and verifiable progress before sanctions are lifted or relaxed.

So Trump’s announcement of a second summit seemed precipitate. The US president may be hoping to build on the momentum of the first summit. But there is also speculation that he is looking for a win on the international stage as a distraction from mounting domestic frustrations. Peters is a believer in economic development as the key to North Korea’s reintegration into the international community. But he says North Korea will need to produce more than rhetoric to show the world it is serious about denuclearisation first.

Peters and Payne reiterated that a path to ‘‘complete verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation’’ was a prerequisite to relaxing sanctions.

‘‘Verification is critical . . . we should not lighten up our demands for that,’’ Peters told reporters. That was the only way to bring finality to the long running tensions on the peninsula.

‘‘As [Winston Churchill] once said, it’s better to jaw jaw jaw than war war war, but now on this matter we want to see it coming to finality. We will be supportive of any group of countries, or the American nation, if they can do that, and bring it to finality that does not see nuclearisation of the nuclear peninsula and wider.’’

*Tracy Watkins travelled to Seoul and Washington recently with funding from the US government.