Cake news: will Trump’s wish for summit come true?
North Korean leader Kim and US president to hold closed-door meeting today but Pompeo seems to be lowering expectations of outcome
US President Donald Trump at an early birthday celebration during lunch with Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, not seen, in the city-state yesterday, ahead of his meeting today with Kim Jong-un. Mr Trump turns 72 on Thursday. Reports,
The US President Donald Trump raised expectations for the outcome of his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un today by announcing that he would be leaving Singapore tonight, earlier than scheduled, because nuclear negotiations have moved “more quickly than expected”.
But the White House released no details on any progress in preliminary talks between aides yesterday. The abrupt change in schedule – Mr Trump was due to leave tomorrow – came shortly after Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State, appeared to lower expectations for the summit.
The meeting, long sought by Pyongyang, will be the first between a serving US president and a North Korean leader and will focus on the nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles the North has spent decades developing.
Just hours before the crunch talks, Mr Kim left his luxury hotel for a night-time stroll around some of Singapore’s main sights, even posing for selfies with his guide, the citystate’s foreign minister.
Setting out the US position yesterday, Mr Pompeo stressed that the Trump administration would accept only complete denuclearisation of the North.
But in return, Washington would offer “different and unique” guarantees “to provide them sufficient certainty that they can be comfortable that denuclearisation is not something that ends badly for them”.
He refused to go into details. But Pyongyang has long sought an end to the US military presence in South Korea, where Washington has about 28,000 troops stationed to protect it from the North, with which it is still technically at war.
North Korea has demanded an end to what it calls a “hostile policy” towards it but in public has pledged only to pursue the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula – a euphemism open to different interpretations.
Washington is eager to see if the North’s pledges were sincere, Mr Pompeo said. “The United States has been fooled before.”
Verification would be key, he went on, saying many deals had been signed before only to find “the North Koreans did not promise what they said”.
Mr Trump and Mr Kim will first meet one on one in a closed session this morning, before a larger meeting with key advisers, the White House said.
The North’s official KCNA news agency said Mr Kim would exchange “wide-ranging and profound views” on issues including “building a permanent and durable peacekeeping mechanism on the Korean peninsula” and “realising the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula”.
The wider session will include John Bolton, the National Security Adviser, who recently nearly derailed the summit with hawkish comments about disarming North Korea.
Mr Pompeo said there would be more discussions to come. Today’s meeting “will set the framework for the hard work that will follow”, he said. “We will see how far we get.”
In Seoul, President Moon Jaein had a 40-minute phone call with Mr Trump, after telling key aides that it could take “one year, two years or even longer to completely resolve the issues concerned”.
The North, which has been subjected to increasingly strict sanctions by the UN Security Council and others, has made promises of change in the past, such as at the lengthy Six Party Talks process, only for the agreements to collapse later.
Today’s summit is an extraordinary turnaround from last year, when Mr Trump threatened the North with “fire and fury” and Mr Kim called him a “mentally deranged US dotard”, sending fears of conflict soaring.
The summit raises hopes of progress towards a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War, the last festering legacy of the Cold War, after hostilities stopped with only an armistice.
But critics said it risks becoming more of a media circus than an occasion for substantial progress.
The US leader has vacillated on expectations for the meeting, signalling that it could be the beginning of a process of several meetings, only to call it a “one-time shot” for peace as he embarked for Singapore and saying he would know “within the first minute” whether an agreement would be possible.
Yesterday, at a working lunch with Lee Hsien Loong, the Singapore Prime Minister, he said: “I just think it’s going to work out very nicely.”
The previous US stance, said Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation, was that “we don’t deploy a president to negotiate a treaty, we deploy a president to sign a treaty where we know where every piece of punctuation is on that piece of paper …
“One of my worries is that we come out of this Singapore summit with something that looks remarkably like the Six Party Talks or anything that the president has previously criticised but it is hyped as something that’s historic and new and groundbreaking.”
One of my worries is that we come out of this with something that looks remarkably like the Six Party Talks BRUCE KLINGNER Heritage Foundation