Summit could be a last chance
South Korea’s presidential Blue House hopes a planned second summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will be a “turning point” in efforts to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons, but one newspaper is already calling it a “last chance”.
Trump and Kim will meet for a second time in late February, the White House announced, eight months after their first summit in Singapore produced a vaguely worded commitment to establishing friendlier relations and working towards denuclearisation, but no detailed road map of how to get there.
Since then, the negotiations between the two governments have stalled, with Pyongyang displaying a clear preference for dealing directly with Trump than members of his Administration.
US envoy Stephen Biegun has been repeatedly snubbed in recent months as he attempted to open a dialogue with North Korea, but he is travelling to Stockholm to meet his counterpart, Vice Foreign Minister Choi Sun Hee.
“Seoul and Washington have done their homework but the moment of truth will come during real negotiations with Pyongyang now,” said Duyeon Kim, of the Centre for a New American Security, based in Seoul. “A month really isn’t much time if they want substantive results, so they will need to get very busy and serious. The next summit will be an indicator of whether real denuclearisation can happen at all, how much of it can be done, and how long it might take.”
Opinions in Seoul about the likelihood of the summit yielding progress tend to be split along predictable conservative and liberal lines, the former much more cynical about Kim Jong Un’s real intentions than the latter.
But both sides agree that it’s important for Trump and Kim to go beyond the rhetoric of Singapore and get down to business. Even South Korean President Moon Jae In, the strongest advocate of the process, called on both men this month to move from abstract talk to concrete action.
But for that to happen, it’s important that Biegun and Choi lay the groundwork over the next few weeks, experts say.
“This will prove challenging as there’s little basis to think that the North Koreans see Biegun as an influential figure within the Trump administration,” said Ankit Panda of the Federation of American Scientists.
Joseph Yun, who served as Biegun’s predecessor from 2016 to 2018 and is now at the United States Institute of Peace, said another summit like the one in Singapore would “play into North Korea’s hands,” allowing them to drag the process out and helping them establish themselves as a de facto nuclear-armed state. Trump and Kim “need to get down and have some framework, and get some meaningful deliverables within a reasonable period of time”.