MOON HAS DELICATE TASK IN HIS THIRD SUMMIT WITH KIM
South Korea’s president Moon Jae-in has agreed to hold his third meeting this year with Kim Jongun in Pyongyang next month, as both leaders push their peace initiative despite misgivings in the diplomatic community.
The task for Mr Moon as the first southern president to visit Pyongyang since 2007 is maintaining momentum for dialogue, while nudging Mr Kim to make progress on ending his nuclear programme.
Mr Kim agreed to nuclear disarmament in a meeting with President Donald Trump in Singapore in June. In return the US leader agreed to wide-ranging negotiations with North Korea and cancelled American war games with the South Korean military.
Doubts over Pyongyang’s commitment to a disarmament deal stem from broken agreements stretching from the mid-1990s to the failed “leap-day” deal in 2012.
Two reports in US newspapers last month revealed details of a continuing North Korean build-up. One said it was expanding a plant for making missiles. The other revealed construction of new models at the plant where the country’s first inter-continental missile was produced.
North Korea has rejected the US demands for specific concessions up front. US officials have said that Washington wants a specific proportion of its weapons handed over at the start of the process.
US politicians have turned up the heat on the White House on the overture to North Korea. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat senator, declared on Twitter that Mr Trump’s strategy had failed and “only North Korea” was winning.
North Korea is believed to have up to 60 nuclear devices and substantial uranium and plutonium facilities. It rejects demands to decommission them as “gangster-like logic”, maintaining it will not succumb to pressure.
It says it wants sanctions pressure lifted and a peace treaty signed before it will take further steps.
So Washington’s willingness to make a “bold move” through a peace treaty with Pyongyang is the hinge on which the talks succeed or fail, North Korean diplomats say.
Experienced negotiators such as Elizabeth Sherwood Randall of Harvard’s Belfer Centre have said the US concessions, including the meeting between Mr Kim and Mr Trump and cancelling the exercises, were already a substantial gift to Pyongyang.
“We have given plenty and now we want to see concrete action from Pyongyang,” she said.
Another US veteran of the decades of talks, Newell Highsmith, an arms control expert at the US State Department for three decades, has pointed to North Korean officials’ expertise in pushing talks to the limits. Mr Highsmith said a deal could be done that would hold Pyongyang to disarmament.
“They will have a lot of reasons why you don’t need this or that level of detail, or to have this assurance or whatever, but you better have it in writing,” he said. “In my experience if you have something very precise, very detailed in writing, they will follow through on it.”
On Mr Trump’s inner team there are officials who are deeply doubtful about a deal. John Bolton, the US National Security Adviser, last week said Pyongyang had “not taken the steps” necessary to denuclearise.
But the North Koreans appear confident in their ability to wring concessions from Mr Trump. When Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State, pressed the nuclear issue in recent talks, the North Korean delegate asked him if he wanted to take a step outside to check with the White House.
Arms experts have pressed the North Koreans to rejoin the nuclear test ban treaty to establish confidence.
“One has to respect the steps that have been taken. It’s better than nothing,” Lassina Zerbo, executive secretary of the preparatory commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation, said last week. “But verification is what brings trust.
“Right now we need confidence-building measures – not just between two Koreas but also with the international community, to see that North Korea is serious about the denuclearisation process.”
The symbolism of Mr Moon’s visit to Pyongyang is a fillip for the process. There is also speculation that Mr Kim may fly to the US to attend the annual UN General Assembly late next month and meet Mr Trump for a second time.