U.S. dispatches army of envoys to salvage N. Korea talks
WASHINGTON —The United States and North Korea on Sunday kicked off an urgent, behind-the-scenes effort to resurrect a summit meeting between their two leaders by June 12, racing to develop a joint agenda and dispel deep skepticism about the chances for reaching a framework for a lasting nuclear agreement in so little time.
Technical and diplomatic experts from the United States made a rare visit to North Korea to meet with their counterparts, U.S. officials said Sunday. Before any summit meeting, the U.S. team, led by Sung Kim, a veteran diplomat, is seeking detailed commitments from Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, about his regime’s willingness to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
In a tweet Sunday night, President Donald Trump confirmed the meetings in the North Korean part of Panmunjom, a “truce village” in the Demilitarized Zone that separates the two Koreas. He also expressed his administration’s newfound optimism about the meeting, further embracing the conciliatory language both sides have used since he canceled the planned meeting in a bitterly worded letter to Kim Jong Un on Thursday.
“I truly believe North Korea has brilliant potential and will be a great economic and financial Nation one day,” Trump wrote on Twitter after a second straight day of golf at his Virginia club. “Kim Jong Un agrees with me on this. It will happen!”
White House officials said Joe Hagin, a deputy White House chief of staff, is leading a separate delegation in Singapore, where the summit meeting had been scheduled to take place, to work out logistics: when the various meetings would take place, how much would be open to the press, which officials
“I truly believe North Korea has brilliant potential and will be a great economic and financial Nation one day.”
President Trump in a Sunday tweet
would be in the negotiating rooms, how to handle security concerns.
The simultaneous negotiations in the DMZ and in Singapore signaled an accelerated effort by the governments in both countries to complete the substantive and practical preparations required to get the meeting back on track.
Such issues would typically be handled by a well-established diplomatic process of lower-level negotiations that usually takes months, if not years, before a meeting between the leaders of two nations. But Trump short-circuited that process in March, when he abruptly accepted an invitation to meet with Kim.
Now, after just as abruptly canceling the summit meeting, Trump has — wittingly or not — set in motion a more normal set of discussions to lay the groundwork for an agreement about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program before a decision on whether to hold a meeting between the two leaders after all.
The timeline is still extraordinarily condensed. Trump’s repeatedly stated desire to keep June 12 as a possible date for a summit meeting means that officials on both sides are rushing to see if the necessary preparations can be completed in a matter of days. Veteran negotiators said it remained unclear whether the two sides could complete enough work to make a meeting possible.
“The president says he’s not going to go until there is substantial agreement. The question is, is there time to reach that kind of agreement?” said Joseph Y. Yun, a former chief North Korea negotiator at the State Department, who retired in part because of his frustration with his agency’s diminished role. “Right now, the summit is kind of teetering on whether we make progress on those things.”
Two top Republican lawmakers expressed deep misgivings Sunday about the prospects for a successful summit meeting in just over two weeks, and warned that Kim would never agree to give up the nuclear weapons his country has spent decades developing.
“I remain convinced that he does not want to denuclearize, in fact he will not denuclearize,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said on ABC’s “This Week.” He dismissed demonstrations of goodwill by Kim — including the release of American prisoners and the destruction of a nuclear test site — as meaningless.
“It’s all a show,” Rubio said. “It’s a show.”