Korean leaders’ historic meeting sets table for talks with Trump
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA— Rush hour in South Korea’s over-caffeinated capital runs at a frenzy — so it was remarkable to see commuters freeze Friday morning and fixate on giant Samsung television screens showing the scene unfolding in the Demilitarized Zone, where time stopped in 1953.
Kim Jong Un, in a black Mao suit, stepped across a low concrete barrier into the South Korean territory, a first for a North Korean leader since the catastrophic and unfinished war seven decades ago. He reached out to the South’s president, Moon Jae-in, and led him back over into the North’s territory.
It was a reminder, if anyone here needed one, that Kim, 34, has played the master choreographer in this remarkable dance step along a nuclear precipice. Kim silenced those who thought he was too young and callow to rule by executing his uncle, fatally poisoning a half-brother, installing his own generals and putting nuclear and missile programs into overdrive.
And after spending 2017 proving that his backward nation could hurl missiles across the Pacific, and could test a weapon many times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb, Kim seized on an invitation from South Korea to take part in the 2018 Winter Olympics and suddenly played the statesman. On Friday he hinted anew that his nuclear arsenal might be on the table, if the price was right.
U.S. President Donald Trump insists that his own actions are responsible, that his threats of “fire and fury” and, more important, his intensified sanctions, forced Kim to this moment. He is partly right: Trump has shown an energy in confronting North Korea that president Barack Obama never did.
But disarmament experts who watched the leaders meet in the DMZ agreed that Kim had been driving the events.
Kim has learned the art of surprise as surely as his grandfather, Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founder and his role model, did. The elder Kim caught the world unaware by invading the South in June 1950.
The Friday encounter did everything it was supposed to do to set up the next summit meeting, between Kim and Trump. That is the moment, South Koreans say, for any nuclear deal to be struck, something that can only happen when a U.S. president is in the room.
The question is whether Kim is really ready to make that deal, or whether he is betting, as most experts think he is, that he can get help to normalize the North’s economy while keeping at least parts of a fearsome arsenal that he believes has kept the Kim family in power.
The agreement, published Friday afternoon, as the two Korean leaders headed into a dinner that was rich in symbolism about the common traditions of the North and South, says little on the nuclear topic.
North Korea’s media have not publicly mentioned the summit since reporting early Friday that Kim had left Pyongyang to meet with Moon. It’s possible the North is spending extra time so its propaganda experts can give the summit a major news treatment on television and in newspapers later today.
If the substance on nuclear matters was light, the images Friday at the border village of Panmunjom were striking: Kim and Moon set aside a year that saw them seemingly on the verge of war, grasped hands and strode together across the cracked concrete slab that marks the Koreas’ border.
The sight allowed the pair to step toward the possibility of a co-operative future even as they acknowledged a fraught past and the widespread skepticism that, after decades of failed diplomacy, things will be any different this time.
On the nuclear issue, the leaders merely repeated a previous vow to rid their peninsula of nuclear weapons, saying they will achieve a “nuclear-free Ko- rean Peninsula through complete denuclearization.” This kicks one of the world’s most pressing issues down the road to the much-anticipated summit between Kim and Trump.
“There is no reference to verification, timetables, or an attempt to define the word ‘complete.’ It does not reiterate or advance Pyongyang’s unilateral offer to halt nuclear and ICBM tests,” said Adam Mount, a senior defence analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. “In practice, this statement should enable a U.S.-North Korea summit to detail specifics about what, when, and how denuclearization would occur, but it has not offered a head start on that process. All of the negotia- tion is left to a U.S. team that is understaffed and has little time to prepare.”
The agreement sets a deadline to complete some kind of peace arrangement — not necessarily a treaty — by the end of this year. But it sets no schedule for denuclearization. That is a critical point, because until now the Trump administration’s position has been that the North must surrender all its weapons first, and that any talk of treaties or trade, or sanctions relief, would come only when its weapons, its uranium and plutonium and its missiles are securely out of the country. Moon’s advisers insisted that the vagueness of the agreement published Friday was a virtue, not a defect, and that it would be up to others to work out the details. But they also insist that “Chairman Kim,” as they called the young leader, is driven by different imperatives than his father and grandfather were. “They want a Trump Tower and a McDonald’s,” Moon Chung-in, a special adviser to the South Korean president, insisted in an interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN on Friday.
Perhaps they do — the North’s most famous hotel, in Pyongyang, the capital, leans so dangerously it was never opened, and North Korea is not known for its fast-food chains. But ask the people who have seen past peace initiatives whether they think this one will work out any differently, and they have serious doubts that Kim will give up his nuclear program for any price.