Trump-Kim summit in play as Moon visits White House
WASHINGTON, D. C.: Donald Trump holds a high-stakes meeting with South Korea’s president at the White House on Tuesday, talks that could decide whether the US President’s much-vaunted summit with the North’s leader Kim Jong Un goes ahead.
- ington on a mission to salvage a rare diplomatic opening between
trouble almost before it begins.
Trump had agreed to meet inscrutable “Supreme Leader” Kim in Singapore on June 12, but the
is now in serious doubt, with both sides expressing reservations.
South Korea— worried about Kim’s bellicose weapons testing and Trump’s similarly bellicose warnings about a looming war— was instrumental in convincing the two Cold War foes to sit down and talk.
Moon sent his own national security advisor to the White House in March, carrying an offer of talks
willing to abandon nuclear weapons, an enticing prospect.
Trump surprised his guests, his own aides and the world by summarily accepting the meeting, seeing an opportunity to “do a deal” and avoid military confrontation.
Pyongyang is on the verge of marrying nuclear and missile technology allowing it to hit the continental United States with a nuke, a capability Washington sees as wholly unacceptable.
Since then, there has been a landmark series of intra-Korean meetings, two trips to Pyongyang by Mike Pompeo— first as CIA director then as America’s top diplomat—and three American citizens have been released from
But after several Trumpian vic- is now in ness to denuclearize serious doubt.
- rea denounced US demands for “unilateral nuclear abandonment” and cancelled at the last minute a high-level meeting with the South
between Seoul and Washington.
Trump responded by saying the meeting may or may not take place.
Vice President Mike Pence warned in an interview on Monday night that there was “no question” that Trump would be prepared to walk away from the talks with Kim if it looks like they won’t yield results and that
public relations triumph.
Pence said that both the Clinton and Bush administrations “got of what they feared all along, that Pyongyang may have been playing for time—hoping to ease sanctions and “maximum pressure” or of South Korea overtorquing the prospects of a deal.
“The current episode of tension
- pectation gap between the United