Clashing views color future of stalled N.Korea nuclear talks
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — To hear a beaming Donald Trump at his June summit with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, the solution to North Korea’s headlong pursuit of nuclear weapons, a foreign policy nightmare that has flummoxed U.S. leaders since the early 1990s, was at hand.
Since the remarkable claims made during the first-ever meeting of leaders from the archrival nations, however, there have been recriminations, simmering bad blood — and very little progress. In other words, just what skeptics in Seoul and Washington have come to expect from North Korean nuclear diplomacy.
So even as Trump says he’s keen on another summit, possibly early next year, continuing sanctions and pressure from Washington are met with anger and foot-dragging from Pyongyang, which has bluntly stated that an “improvement of relations and sanctions are incompatible.”
One of the problems is a matter of wording. The statement hammered out in Singapore, which called for “the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” was so vague that it seemed tailor made for a stalemate: Each side can claim to be right when they say that they’ve done more than enough and it’s the other side’s responsibility to act.
So where do we go from here?A second summit seems the most likely answer.
Trump’s national security adviser said such a meeting would not be a reward and that the president merely wants to give North Korea “a chance to live up to the commitments they’ve made at the Singapore summit.”
“He’s held the door open for them, they need to walk through it,” John Bolton said in an interview with NPR. “And this is one more chance for Kim Jong Un who is the only decision maker that matters in the North Korean system to deliver on what he said in Singapore, and that’s possible I think some time after the first of the year.”
Other diplomatic channels have stalled, including talks between Trump and Kim’s main envoys, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his North Korean counterpart Kim Yong Chol.
Pompeo did meet on Thursday in Washington with South Korea’s foreign minister in a new attempt to push the process forward. The State Department said only that the two officials “reaffirmed the ironclad alliance between the United States and (South) Korea and pledged to maintain close coordination to ensure the final, fully verified denuclearization of (North) Korea.”
Pompeo has traveled to Pyongyang four times this year, but canceled a planned meeting with a top North Korean official in New York last month when the North balked. Tentative plans to reschedule those talks, perhaps as early as next week, remain uncertain.
Meanwhile, Pompeo’s invitation for Kim to name a counterpart for his special North Korea envoy, former Ford Motor Co. executive Stephen Biegun, and send that person to Vienna for lower-level working discussions, has gone unanswered.
The views from both Seoul and Washington are complicated.