U.S. envoy arrives in North Korea
A SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — senior American negotiator arrived in North Korea on Wednesday to sort out crucial details for a nuclear summit meeting in Vietnam between President Donald Trump and the North’s leader, Kim Jong Un, with only three weeks to go before the talks take place.
Stephen Biegun, the Trump administration’s special representative for North Korea, arrived in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, around the time that Trump announced in his State of the Union address that he and Kim would meet for a second time on Feb. 27-28 in Vietnam. Biegun’s trip had been announced in advance.
When Kim and Trump first met in Singapore in June, they agreed to work toward the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” and to build “new” relations between their countries. But since then, talks have stalled over how to carry out that vaguely worded agreement.
Trump now wants “significant and verifiable progress on denuclearization, actions that are bold and real,” Biegun said last week in a speech at Stanford University. But American intelligence agencies recently cautioned the North was “unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capability.”
During his Pyongyang visit, Biegun plans to pursue “concrete plans to advance all of the elements of the Singapore joint statement,” he said last week. He said the working-level talks in Pyongyang would be aimed at finding concessions that each side could accept, as well as “a road map of negotiations and declarations going forward, and a shared understanding of the desired outcomes of our joint efforts.”
Biegun’s trip to negotiate such important unresolved issues, just weeks before the talks, reflects the topdown diplomacy Trump and Kim appear to prefer. The American envoy had his first meeting with Kim Hyok-chol, his newly appointed North Korean counterpart, three weeks ago in Washington.
Unlike their predecessors, Trump and Kim Jong Un — after a series of vitriolic exchanges during the U.S. president’s first year in office — have personally driven their countries’ diplomatic engagement, exchanging letters and flattering remarks. Trump has boasted of his “fantastic chemistry” with Kim.
In Vietnam, a one-party Communist state where government offices were closed Wednesday for the Lunar New Year holiday, Trump’s announcement was noted in the state-controlled news media. Le Thi Thu Hang, a spokeswoman for the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry, said in a statement the country “strongly supports dialogues held with a view to maintaining peace, security and stability in the Korean Peninsula.”
Others in Vietnam said the meeting would be a good opportunity for Vietnam to raise its international profile, advance some of its strategic interests and improve its relationship with the U.S.
Biegun said last week that Trump’s bold approach had allowed more room for maneuver than any of the envoy’s predecessors had. His North Korean counterpart is from the State Affairs Commission, a powerful agency that reports directly to Kim Jong Un.
“It’s a positive sign that the working-level teams of both sides are headed by figures who are considered flexible and deeply trusted by their leaders,” said Cheong Seong-chang, an analyst at the Sejong Institute in South Korea.
But critics said that going into a meeting with Kim without a clear set of agreements hammered out in advance by staff would be dangerous, raising the prospect of another summit deal with no more specifics on how to denuclearize the North than the Singapore one had.
In his speech last week, Biegun acknowledged the United States and North Korea had yet to come up with “a specific and agreed definition” of the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, the goal that both leaders pledged in Singapore to work toward.