Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
New Korea talks are underway
A summit between leaders from North and South Korea is trying to pick up where the U.S. left off.
WASHINGTON — A better-than-expected outcome of the summit between the two Koreas kickstarted stalled negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang, boosting President Donald Trump’s highstakes push to get the North to give up its nuclear weapons by the end of his first term in office.
But it left open a burning question: Will the concessions North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is offering be enough to convince the U.S. to meet any of his demands?
Trump, characteristically, hailed the result of the talks in Pyongyang between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jaein as “very exciting” and a sign of “tremendous progress” in his effort to get North Korea to denuclearize, which Kim agreed to do in vague terms when he met with Trump in Singapore in June.
Diplomacy between the U.S. and North Korea that had gotten nowhere since the summit clicked into gear again.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday invited North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho for talks in New York next week, during the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations. North Korean representatives were also invited to meet with the U.S. envoy for North Korean policy, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna “at the earliest opportunity.”
“This will mark the beginning of negotiations to transform U.S.-DPRK relations through the process of rapid denuclearization of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021, as committed by Chairman Kim, and to construct a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula,” Pompeo said in a statement, using the initials of the country’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
With scant progress in the past three months, Trump has been open to criticism that he had been too eager to hold an unprecedented meeting with the North Korean leader in the summer and gained little in return. Moon, who was the handmaiden of the Kim-Trump dialogue back in the spring, was under considerable pressure this week to extract concessions from Kim that could sustain the rapprochement between Washington and Pyongyang.
While Kim didn’t commit Wednesday to giving up his arsenal of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that pose a threat to the U.S. mainland, he did promise to dismantle North Korea’s main rocket launch site in the presence of international experts, and offered to shutter its Nyongbyon nuclear site. That’s where the North has a plutonium reactor and a uranium enrichment facility that can produce fissile material for atomic bombs. Dismantling it wouldn’t reduce North Korea’s atomic stockpile, thought to be enough for 40 to 60 bombs, but it could help cap it.
The catch is that Kim wants the U.S. to take unspecified “corresponding steps” — a likely reference to North Korea’s desire for the U.S. to declare a formal end to the Korean War, in which fighting ended in 1953 without a peace treaty. The North is also vying for the U.S. to allow relief from sanctions that are hurting its struggling economy.
Washington will be reluctant to grant hasty concessions given North Korea’s poor history in following through on its nuclear promises after negotiations.
The Trump administration has been demanding denuclearization, or at least concrete progress toward that goal, before it grants rewards.