With snap ‘yes,’ Trump rolls dice on North Korea
WASHINGTON — Summoned to the Oval Office on the spur of the moment, the South Korean envoy found himself face-to-face with President Donald Trump one afternoon last week at what he thought might be a hinge moment in history.
Chung Eui-yong had come to the White House bearing an invitation. But he opened with flattery, which diplomats have discovered is a key to approaching the volatile American leader. “We could come this far thanks to a great degree to President Trump,” Chung said. “We highly appreciate this fact.”
Then he got to the point: The United States, South Korea and their allies should not repeat their “past mistakes,” but South Korea believed that North Korea’s mercurial leader, Kim Jong Un, was “frank and sincere” when he said he wanted to talk with the Americans about giving up his nuclear program. Kim, he added, had told the South Koreans that if Trump would join him in an unprecedented summit meeting, the two could produce a historic breakthrough.
Trump accepted on the spot, stunning not only Chung and the other high-level South Koreans who were with him, but also the phalanx of U.S. officials who were gathered in the Oval Office.
His advisers had assumed the president would take more time to discuss such a decision with them first. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the president’s national security adviser, both expressed caution. If you go ahead with this, they told Trump, there will be risks and downsides.
Trump brushed them off. I get it, I get it, he said.
Where others see flashing yellow lights and slow down, Trump speeds up. And just like that, in the course of 45 minutes in the Oval Office, Trump threw aside caution and dispensed with decades of convention to embark on a daring, high-wire diplomatic gambit aimed at resolving one of the world’s most intractable standoffs.
A thorny road
The path to a possible meeting led through a thicket of hostility and feints.
Throughout his first year in office, Trump ratcheted up economic sanctions while rattling his nuclear saber at “Little Rocket Man” and threatening to “totally destroy North Korea.”
Kim could match the president he called “the mentally deranged U.S. dotard” bombast for bombast. In a New Year’s Day speech, he said he had “a nuclear button on the desk” that could launch missiles capable of reaching the United States. Trump responded with a tweet saying that “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his.”
But South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, focused on the other part of Kim’s speech, when he declared that he would send athletes to the Winter Olympics, which would be held the next month in South Korea. A flurry of negotiations ensued at Panmunjom, the “truce village” inside the Korean Demilitarized Zone, that, by the standards of inter-Korean talks, went unusually well.
For the opening ceremony, on Feb. 9, Kim sent his sister, Kim Yo Jong, while Trump sent Vice President Mike Pence. The vice president was told of a possible meeting with North Korean officials at the Games if he would tone down his message, not talk about sanctions, not meet with defectors and not bring along Fred Warmbier, whose son, Otto, a U.S. student, died soon after being released from captivity in North Korea.
Pence opted to do all of those anyway to show resolve, and the North Koreans canceled the meeting at the last minute. Taking the hard-line position he believed the president wanted him to take, a grim-faced Pence refused to stand for the entry of the joint Korean team that included athletes from both North and South and made a point of refusing to greet Kim’s sister, who was just 10 feet away.
Pence’s failure to stand was taken as an insult to Moon and the South Korean public, undercutting the vice president’s intent to show solidarity with an ally. Moon had been determined to bring the Americans and North Koreans together, to the irritation of the U.S. delegation, which believed that he was deliberately trying to stage-manage an encounter they considered awkward and inappropriate.
Moon, by contrast, hosted Kim for a lavish luncheon at the presidential Blue House, and she surprised him with a letter from her brother. She told Moon that her brother wanted to convene a summit meeting at an early date. The two spent nearly three hours together, with Moon doing most of the talking.
He said he really wanted to meet Kim and improve ties, but there was a limit to how far he could go without progress in dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program. He urged North Korea to talk to the Americans and said they needed to hurry so as not to lose the rare momentum from the spirit of the Olympics visits.
All smiles in the North
With the Olympics over, it was time for Moon to make his move. This past week, he sent two trusted aides on a two-day trip to Pyongyang: Chung, his national security adviser, and Suh Hoon, his National Intelligence Service director. Flying north, they knew that they were meeting Kim but not when.
After landing in Pyongyang, they were taken to a riverside guesthouse where they found their rooms equipped with the internet and access to foreign television channels, including CNN. They could even surf South Korean websites, a rare privilege in the totalitarian state. As soon as they unpacked, Kim Yong Chol, a general who heads inter-Korean relations, showed up and said they were meeting Kim that evening.
Chung and Suh were the first South Koreans to set foot inside the party headquarters since the Korean War.
Chung had barely launched into his talking points when Kim said “I know” and “I understand you.” Then he laid out his proposal: talks with the United States on denuclearizing his country; a suspension of nuclear and missile tests during the talks; and his understanding that the United States and South Korea must proceed with annual joint military exercises.
After returning to Seoul on Tuesday, the South Korean officials briefed Moon and then South Korean reporters. After his news conference, Chung called McMaster and told him that he was carrying a message from Kim to Trump. Only several people at the Blue House knew that the message included a proposal for a meeting with Trump.
Off to Washington
Chung and Suh flew to Washington, arriving Thursday morning. By the afternoon, they were at the White House, meeting separately with McMaster and Gina Haspel, the deputy CIA director. The four then got together and were soon joined by other U.S. officials, including Pence; Mattis; Dan Coats, the national intelligence director; Gen. Joseph Dunford, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman; and John Kelly, the White House chief of staff.
Joined by their ambassador to Washington, the South Korean visitors were not supposed to meet with Trump until Friday, but when he heard they were in the building, he called them to the Oval Office.
Kim’s invitation to meet was not a complete surprise to Trump’s team. A U.S. official said they had learned about it from intelligence agencies, so on Thursday morning, before the arrival of the South Koreans, Trump talked by phone with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was traveling in Africa, about the possibility. What he did not tell Tillerson was that he would accept the invitation.
Trump was eager enough, however, that once he said yes, they discussed a meeting as early as next month. But the South Koreans suggested it would be better to wait until after Moon’s summit meeting with Kim in April, which led to a target of May.
Not only did Trump surprise the South Koreans by accepting immediately, he even suggested that they make the public announcement right there and then at the White House.
Trump’s quick decision caught many off guard, including Tillerson and U.S. allies.