Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Denuclearization goal, Trump says
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump headed to his second meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un on Monday, determined to tamp down expectations that he’ll achieve big strides toward denuclearization.
Trump is set to land in Vietnam late today and will have meetings with the host country’s president and prime minister Wednesday before sitting down later with Kim for a private dinner.
Trump will be joined at the dinner by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, the White House said Monday. Kim also will have two aides with him, and there will be translators for both sides. Trump and Kim will have a series of official meetings Thursday.
Trump laid out ultimate goals for both the U.S. and Kim in an appearance before the nation’s governors Monday before boarding Air Force One to fly to Vietnam: “We want denuclearization, and I think he’ll have a country that will set a lot of records for speed in terms of an economy.”
Kim arrived early today in Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital, for the summit. The North Korean leader had previously traveled via armored train from Pyongyang through China until he reached the railway station in Dong Dang, Vietnam, where he was welcomed by Vietnamese troops on a red carpet.
Residents waved North Korean flags and bouquets of flowers as Kim stepped into a black limousine surrounded
by bodyguards and left the station.
Vietnam shut down Highway 1 from Dong Dang, at the Chinese border, to Hanoi — a 105-mile stretch — for the last leg of Kim’s trip. Soldiers and police milled around the Melia Hotel where Kim was set to stay.
Outside the city’s opera house, around the corner from the Metropole Hotel, which is thought to be the summit venue, hundreds of people waited to catch a glimpse of Kim’s motorcade or to protest North Korea’s human-rights record.
Trump was the driving force behind this week’s summit. He has been publicly unconcerned about speculation that his first meeting with Kim last year in Singapore yielded few concrete results, noting that North Korea last year suspended its nuclear and long-range missile tests and said it dismantled its nuclear testing ground.
“I’m not in a rush. I don’t want to rush anybody. I just don’t want testing. As long as there’s no testing, we’re happy,” Trump told the governors.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in was also happy Monday, praising Trump and Kim for traveling “on a path no one has taken before.” The two Koreas have enjoyed warmer relations over the past year.
“If President Trump succeeds in dissolving the world’s last remaining Cold War rivalry, it will become yet another great feat that will be indelibly recorded in world history,” Moon said.
Moon urged his people to prepare for a possible fundamental shift in relations on the Korean Peninsula after the Hanoi summit.
“President Trump is personally spearheading diplomacy toward North Korea with his bold determination and new diplomatic strategies in order not to repeat past failures,” Moon said in a statement. “If the upcoming summit produces results, now is the real beginning.”
Speaking to CNN, Pompeo expressed hope that the two leaders would take steps to realize what Kim had promised in the last summit.
“He promised he’d denuclearize. We hope he’ll make a big step toward that in the week ahead,” he said.
Kim, however, has yet to show that he is willing to deal away an arsenal. The North Koreans have largely eschewed staff-level talks, pushing for discussions between Trump and Kim.
KIM SEEKS DECLARATION
Four main goals emerged from the first Trump-Kim summit: establishing new relations between the nations, recovering the remains of U.S. servicemen from the Korean War, building a new peace on the entire Korean Peninsula, and completing denuclearization of the peninsula.
The opening of liaison offices in each other’s capitals would be a step toward transforming relations between the two countries. Last week, CNN reported that the United States and North Korea are seriously considering exchanging liaison officers, an incremental step toward building formal diplomatic relations.
A key U.S. goal is progress on the search for the remains of U.S. servicemen killed in the 1950-53 Korean War.
Kim is also pushing for a declaration that the war is over, instead of just halted. South Korea says a declaration to end the war could simply be signed by the United States and North Korea, although a formal peace treaty would come later and would have to involve South Korea and China.
“An end-of-war declaration between North Korea and the United States is sufficient on its own,” South Korea presidential spokesman Kim Euikeum told reporters Monday. “Our government would welcome any form the declaration might take, as the important part is the declaration’s role to smoothly bring on and accelerate denuclearization of North Korea.”
U.S. and South Korean analysts have expressed fear that declaring an end to the war would give Kim reason to demand that the United States withdraw its 28,500 troops from the South while the North remains a nuclear-armed state.
But South Korean officials said the declaration would be merely a “political statement” that would “give the North Koreans some comfort.” North Korea has long argued that it was forced to develop a nuclear deterrent because of U.S. “hostility,” and that it would drop that deterrent when it felt safe.
South Korea had earlier hoped that an end-of-war declaration would be made in the presence of Moon and even China’s president, Xi Jinping. China fought for North Korea during the war, while U.S. troops fought alongside the South Koreans.
However, because the United States and South Korea now have formal diplomatic ties with China, an end-of-war declaration is irrelevant. South and North Korea have signed military and
other agreements in recent months that Kim Eui-keum said were tantamount to a nonaggression treaty.
“The North and the United States are the only ones remaining, and if the two declare an end to the war, it will mean that all the four countries that fought war on the Korean Peninsula have declared an end to war,” Kim Eui-keum said.
He added that an end-ofwar declaration is “different from the peace treaty,” which could be signed only “at the end stage of denuclearization.”
Trump administration officials also say those issues should be part of a package deal that focuses on denuclearization, which they said is where the tough talk has to happen in Hanoi.
“There are many things [Kim] could do to demonstrate his commitment to denuclearization,” Pompeo said Sunday. “I don’t want to get into the details of what’s being proposed, what the offers and counteroffers may be, but a real step, a demonstratable, verifiable step, is something that I know President Trump is very focused on achieving.”
In Seoul, lawmakers and officials have their eyes on the Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center, which is home to North Korea’s three nuclear reactors.
It is North Korea’s only source of plutonium, and also one of a few sources of highly enriched uranium used for making nuclear weapons. Closing it down permanently, in the presence of expert inspectors, would slow down North Korea’s ability to produce more nuclear weapons.