PYONGYANG UNDERCUTS US EXUBERANCE OVER KIM MEETING
>> WASHINGTON: The dizzying pace of North Korean-US diplomacy this year had President Donald Trump fielding questions about whether he might win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Now, North Korea has threatened to scrap Mr Trump’s June 12 summit with Kim Jong-un, bringing lofty expectations about what may be achieved at the summit down to Earth. Like Mr Trump’s predecessors, the White House is getting a reality check on the pitfalls of negotiating with the isolated and mercurial regime in Pyongyang.
Ahead of next month’s summit in Singapore, which the White House insists is going forward, scepticism has replaced the confidence that North Korea is ready to reverse decades of intransigence and give up its nuclear weapons for good.
“That rosy outcome was very unlikely to come to fruition,” said Melissa Hanham, a senior researcher at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.
“I never put in a lot of stock in the US-North Korea summit because the US and North Korea have never had a successful negotiation that ended up in preventing nuclear weapons.”
Up until this week, some administration officials were all but declaring success in their bid to use heightened United Nations sanctions and diplomatic isolation to get North Korea to commit to “complete denuclearisation”, without acknowledging that Pyongyang’s definition of the term might be different than Washington’s.
To bolster their optimism, the American officials cited moves North Korea made without much prompting: a promise to freeze nuclear and missile tests, the announcement of plans to destroy a nuclear test site and the decision to release three American prisoners when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited.
With the momentum appearing to build, Mr Pompeo extolled the possible economic benefits North Korea might receive from the US once it gave up its weapons.
“I think he appreciates the fact that this is going to have to be different and big and special, and something that has never been undertaken before,” Mr Pompeo said of Mr Kim when he spoke to Fox News Sunday. “Our eyes are wide open with respect to the risks. But it is our fervent hope that Mr Kim wants to make a strategic change”.
But US hopes began to darken after North Korea issued statements this week withdrawing from a planned meeting with South Korean leaders and threatening to scrap the summit with Trump.
North Korean officials also lambasted National Security Adviser John Bolton, who had gone on television on May 13 to praise the “Libya model” of arms control, under which the late dictator Moammar Qaddafi surrendered his nuclear program in exchange for an easing of economic sanctions.
Two years later, Qaddafi was overthrown by rebels who hunted down and killed him in the streets, providing an alternative definition of the “Libya model” that Mr Kim would rather not be associated with.
In a bid to keep plans for the summit on track, Mr Trump on Thursday contradicted Mr Bolton, saying his administration isn’t using Libya as an example for North Korea “at all” and that the US would probably need to provide assurances to the regime to get a grand bargain.
Under such an accord, Mr Trump said of Mr Kim, “He’d be there, be in his country, he’d be running his country. His country would be very rich”.
North Korea also reacted vehemently against Mr Pompeo’s suggestion that North Korea would be eager for US trade and infrastructure investment that would flow if North Korea gave up its nuclear weapons. What the regime probably wants, analysts say, is just an easing of UN sanctions so that it can conduct whatever business it wants.
“The US is trumpeting as if it would offer economic compensation and benefit in case we abandon nukes,” North Korea’s official news agency, KCNA, said. “But we have never had any expectation of US support in carrying out our economic construction and will not at all make such a deal in future, either.”
The back-and-forth on the US messaging underscored new scepticism and confusion about the administration’s strategy, and what exactly it wants out of the meeting.
“It’s not clear, what is the purpose of the summit, I’m really wondering,” said Srinivasan Sitaraman, a professor of political science at Clark University. “What are the North Koreans willing to give up, what are the compromises the US is willing to make? They are at opposite extremes. I really don’t see where they can come to an agreement”.