S. Korea abuzz about N. Korean leader’s possible trip

Kim Jong Un’s media services silent

SEOUL, South Korea — Day after day, speculation about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s possible trip to Seoul is making headlines in South Korea, despite no official confirmation from either government.

Many analysts say it would be extremely difficult for Kim to fulfill by the end of this year his reported promise to become the first North Korean leader to visit South Korea, given limited time and impasses in global diplomacy on his nuclear weapons. But others say we will not know until the year is over, noting that several previously unthinkable events have happened in the past months, including Kim’s June summit with President Donald Trump in Singapore.

As the year draws to a close, South Korean media, experts and politicians are churning out reports and guesswork on whether Kim will come to Seoul by the end of December, or will postpone or even spike his plan.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in appears to be pushing Kim to keep his promise, though he said there is no time frame for his visit. After a meeting with Trump last week on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Argentina, Moon told reporters that the two agreed that Kim’s trip would play a “very positive role” in U.S.-North Korea nuclear diplomacy. Moon suggested that Trump agreed Kim’s Seoul trip could come before the resumption of high-level U.S.North Korea talks, including a possible second Trump-Kim summit.

The ball is in Kim’s court now, but his propaganda services have been silent about a Seoul trip.

Kim might find such a trip less beneficial now than when he agreed to it after his third summit with Moon in Pyongyang in September. At the time, some experts said the U.S. could soon accept a North Korean request for jointly declaring the end of the 1950-53 Korean War as part of security assurances so that Kim could find it less burdensome to make a symbolic, emotionally charged trip to Seoul.

But North Korea-U.S. diplomacy has since come to a standstill amid disputes over a U.S. demand that North Korea first disclose a full inventory of its nuclear weapons and take significant denuclearization steps.

No North Korean leader has traveled to South Korea since the end of the Korean War, which killed millions.

There have been five summit talks between the leaders of the Koreas, three of them between Kim and Moon, but they all happened either in Pyongyang or the inter-Korean border village of Panmunjom.

When Kim’s influential sister, Kim Yo Jong, and favorite pop diva, Hyon Song Wol, came to South Korea earlier this year at the start of his outreach to the South, their trips triggered a media frenzy here, with TV cameras and photographers following their every move.

A Kim trip to Seoul would surely garner even more worldwide attention.

Seoul is the bustling capital of a country that Kim until last year repeatedly vowed to destroy with his nuclear weapons, and which his dictator father and grandfather wanted to unify with the North.