North Korea drops troop demand, but U.S. wary

KEY WEST, Fla. — North Korea has dropped its demand that U.S. troops be removed from South Korea as a condition for giving up its nuclear weapons, South Korea’s president said Thursday in presenting the idea to the United States.

President Moon Jae-in portrayed the proposal as a concession on the eve of talks involving the two Koreas and the United States. The North has long demanded that the 28,500 U.S. troops be withdrawn, citing their presence as a pretext to justify its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

But in Washington, the Trump administration privately dismissed the idea that it was a capitulation by the North because a U.S. withdrawal from the South was never on the table.

Mike Pompeo, the CIA director whom President Donald Trump secretly sent to Pyongyang two weeks ago to meet Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, did not ask him to take such a step, senior officials said.

The move could increase pressure on the United States to support negotiations between North and South Korea on a peace treaty that would end the

Korean War. While Trump gave those talks his blessing this week, officials said his ultimate goal is to force North Korea to relinquish its nuclear program. A peace treaty, they said, should be signed only after the North has given up its weapons.

Trump has expressed excitement about his own planned summit meeting with Kim, but on Wednesday, he said he was ready to bail out before, or even during, the meeting if he concluded that diplomacy was not bearing fruit. He also said the U.S. would keep sanctions on North Korea until it relinquishes its nuclear program.

“We have great respect for many aspects of what they’re doing, but we have to get it together,” Trump said at a news conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan. “We have to end nuclear weapons.”

Analysts and former officials said the White House was right to be wary of Kim’s offer. They said it could drive a wedge between the United States and South Korea, which is deeply invested in bringing an end to the 68-year military conflict on the Korean Peninsula and will view Kim’s offer as an important step in that direction.

“It’s a classic, deft North Korean maneuver, which puts us at a disadvantage and makes us look like bad guys if we reject it,” said Evan S. Medeiros, a former Asia adviser to President Barack Obama.

In South Korea, where Moon announced Kim’s shift, he said it had encouraged the United States to proceed with plans to hold its first-ever summit meeting with North Korea. And he said the North was already showing a willingness to make concessions.

“The North Koreans did not present any conditions that the United States could not accept, such as the withdrawal of American troops in South Korea,” Moon told newspaper publishers in Seoul, before his own planned summit meeting with Kim next Friday.

“They only talk about an end to hostilities against their country and about getting security guarantees,” Moon said. “It’s safe to say that the plans for dialogue between the North and the United States could proceed because that has been made clear.”

When Moon’s special envoys met with Kim in Pyongyang early last month, Kim said his country would no longer need nuclear weapons if it did not feel “threatened militarily” and was provided with “security guarantees.”

North Korea issued an official government statement as recently as 2016 calling on Washington to announce the withdrawal of U.S. troops if it wanted to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.

Since the 1990s, however, North Korean officials have occasionally told the Americans and South Koreans that they could live with a U.S. military presence if Washington signed a peace treaty and normalized ties with the North. Kim’s father and predecessor, Kim Jong Il, sent a party secretary to the United States in 1992 to deliver that message.

When South Korea’s president at the time, Kim Dae-jung, met with Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang in 2000, the North Korean leader was quoted as saying that keeping U.S. troops in Korea for “stability in Northeast Asia” even after a reunification was “not a bad idea, provided that the status and the role of U.S. troops be changed.”

“It is desirable that U.S. troops stay as a peacekeeping force in Korea, instead of a hostile force against the North,” Kim Jong Il said, according to the book Peacemaker, by Lim Dong-won, who attended the 2000 inter-Korean summit meeting.

Despite their suspicions about the younger Kim’s motives, U.S. officials did not diminish the significance of his offer from a domestic standpoint. For decades, they said, the Kim family has survived by fueling a narrative of American aggression against the North. Declaring they could live with troops could undercut that narrative.

They said the announcement built on Kim’s earlier decision not to protest joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea — a step that did smooth the way for Trump to accept Kim’s invitation to meet.