U.S. reaffirms ‘ironclad commitment’ to South Korea
anticipated summit with Mr. Kim, tentatively scheduled for May or early June.
Mr. Moon and Mr. Kim have pledged to seek a formal end to the Korean War, fought from 1950 to 1953, by year’s end and to rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons. Mr. Trump has said he’s looking forward to the meeting with Mr. Kim and that it “should be quite something.”
“Things are going very well, time and location of meeting with North Korea is being set,” Mr. Trump tweeted. A statement from the White House describing the call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Moon also referred to the North’s future being contingent upon “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization.”
Mr. Trump is claiming credit for the Korean summit, but now faces a burden in helping turn the Korean leaders’ bold but vague vision for peace into reality after more than six decades of hostility.
Mr. Trump must contend with suspicions about his own suitability to conduct that kind of war-and-peace negotiation and succeed where his predecessors have failed, and whether Mr. Kim really is willing to give up the nuclear weapons his nation took decades acquiring.
“It is still unclear whether North Korea still believes that it can have its cake and eat it too,” said Victor Cha, who until January had been in the running to become Mr. Trump’s choice for ambassador to South Korea.
At a White House news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday, Mr. Trump basked in the afterglow of the meeting between Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon, and said he has a responsibility to try to achieve peace and denuclearization.
“And if I can’t do it, it’ll be a very tough time for a lot of countries, and a lot of people. It’s certainly something that I hope I can do for the world,” he said.
Mr. Moon and Mr. Kim have not specified what steps would be taken to formally end the war or eliminate nuclear weapons. Now the pressure to deliver results, at least on the allies’ side, has shifted to Mr. Trump.
The president pushed back against critics who say he’s being manipulated by Mr. Kim, who has abruptly shifted to diplomacy after last year’s full-scale push to become a nuclear power that could threaten the U.S. mainland.
“I don’t think he’s ever had this enthusiasm for somebody, for them wanting to make a deal,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office. “We’re not going to be played, OK. We’re going to hopefully make a deal. The United States in the past has been played like a fiddle.”
New Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who as CIA director met Mr. Kim four weeks ago in North Korea, told reporters in Brussels that he got the impression that Mr. Kim was “serious” about negotiating on denuclearization because of the Trump-led economic pressure campaign.
But Mr. Pompeo added a word of caution: “I am always careful. There is a lot of history here. Promises have been made, hopes have been raised and then dashed.”
North Korea has already called a halt to nuclear and long-range missile tests, which has helped dial down tensions significantly.
North Korea was hit with unprecedented economic restrictions during 2017, when the U.S. and North Korean leaders traded threats while Mr. Kim pushed his nation to the verge of being able to fire a nuclear-tipped missile at the U.S. mainland.
The diplomatic climate has changed dramatically this year, as Mr. Kim has ended his international seclusion, reaching out to South Korea, the U.S., and China.
Mr. Mattis has said the U.S. is “optimistic right now that there’s opportunity here that we have never enjoyed since 1950” and any progress will be up to the diplomats. He was referring to the year the Korean War broke out.
The fighting, which also involved China, cost hundreds of thousands of lives and ended with the declaration of an armistice, not a peace treaty. That has left the peninsula in a technical state of war for decades.
China, Japan and Russia — North Korea’s neighbors — while offering praise for the summit meeting with South Korea that riveted the world this past week, appeared to acknowledge one thing: Now comes the hard part.
Some analysts and media commentators expressed skepticism about the lack of specifics in the accord and warned it would not amount to much unless the United States gives its approval at the coming meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim. Others were more encouraging, suggesting that the agreement could be achieved in time.
The North’s neighbors all have stakes in holding Pyongyang to any commitment that may come out of future talks.
China, which has been enforcing U.N. economic sanctions against its longtime but wayward ally North Korea, welcomed the agreement and urged the two Koreas and other countries to maintain the momentum for dialogue and work together to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.
Mr. Abe, the Japanese prime minister, described the commitment as a “positive move toward the comprehensive settlement of various issues surrounding North Korea.”
In Russia, the Kremlin hailed the agreement as “very positive.” Dmitri S. Peskov, the spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, said the Russian president “has stressed many times that sustainable conflict resolution on the Korean Peninsula can only be based on direct dialogue of both sides.”
In gushing coverage, North Korea’s main newspaper devoted four of its six pages on Saturday to the summit and brightened its usually drab pages with 62 color photographs from the historic event. It even printed the leaders’ joint declaration.
But, like other state-run North Korean news media, the newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, gave no hint on whether Mr. Kim would genuinely consider giving up his nuclear weapons or what he might demand in return. Rather, it focused on the leader’s new diplomatic turn.
However positive the goals described in the threepage agreement, the critical question remained: Does Mr. Kim intend to bargain away his nuclear weapons, or are his diplomatic overtures aimed only at softening his image and easing sanctions against his impoverished country?
The accord set no timetable for denuclearization but said the two sides planned to achieve a permanent peace within the year. Talks to formally end the 1950-53 Korean War would require negotiations involving the main combatants: North and South Korea, China and the United States.
In Japan, there was caution about the lack of specifics in the accord. The document fell far short of the Trump administration’s demands for the dismantlement of the North’s arsenal and of the need for inspections to verify that the weapons no longer existed, officials and commentators said.
The Japanese foreign minister, Taro Kono, called for North Korea to take “concrete actions for the dismantlement of all weapons of mass destruction, including biological and chemical weapons, and ballistic missiles of all ranges in a complete and irreversible manner.”
Mr. Abe, who has strained relations with South Korea, implied that the new accord may not be too different from a similar commitment in 2007 between a previous South Korean president, Roh Moo-hyun, and Kim Jong Il, the father of the current North Korean leader. That accord fell apart soon after it was signed.
Of all the North’s neighbors, Japan is perhaps the most uneasy about the process that began at the interKorean summit meeting. It fears Washington could agree to trade away the North’s long-range intercontinental missiles that can hit the United States, but allow Pyongyang to keep its medium-range missiles, leaving Japan vulnerable.
Mr. Abe went out of his way to remind reporters that he had spent 11 hours with Mr. Trump this month, insisting his proximity to the American president meant he had not been left out of the negotiations over North Korea.
In China, the state-run news media stressed the need for the United States to quickly enter the picture and seal the deal.
Cheng Xiaohe, a professor of international relations at Renmin University, said it was too much to expect the two Korean leaders to come up with a definitive prescription for ending the North’s nuclear program in just one day.
“Kim Jong Un has to leave some gifts for Trump,” Mr. Cheng said. “This summit got a lot of results for an inter-Korean meeting.”