Los Angeles Times

Trump already hands Kim a victory

Agreeing to a meeting gives a major status boost to North Korea, which has long sought to be a world power.

- By Barbara Demick

No matter what else comes of it, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has scored a huge win with President Trump’s agreement to sit down for a face-to-face meeting.

For decades, North Korean officials have angled to meet with a high-level U.S. representa­tive, using all measures of persuasion, whining, wheedling, threatenin­g and even hostage-taking. To secure a chance at that meeting with a sitting U.S. president, no less, amounts to success beyond their wildest dreams.

From a propaganda standpoint, getting into the same room with Trump would elevate the 34-yearold Kim, a pariah and terrorist in the eyes of much of the world, to the status of a world leader.

“This has been North Korea’s long-standing objective to get the president of the United States to come,” said Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA analyst with the Center for Strategic and Internatio­nal Studies. “They just got lucky with Trump. They have been monitoring him very closely. They saw him as a window of opportunit­y with a personalit­y that likes to grab attention.”

Proud and isolated, jealous of its capitalist cousin, South Korea, North Korea has long yearned to be treated as a great power. Its nuclear program has been motivated not only by a desire to protect its system of government but by its hunger for respect on the world stage, analysts say.

Trump’s agreement announced Thursday to sit down with Kim is being compared by some observers to President Nixon’s meeting with China’s Mao Tse-tung in 1972, which is flattering to North Korea.

“The North Koreans have always been waiting for the United States to treat them like China. The U.S. decision to improve relations with China showed China’s centrality,” said Scott Snyder of the Council on Foreign Relations. “They want to matter

strategica­lly.”

The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice, not a treaty, and the United States has never had formal diplomatic relations with the communist country. No sitting American president has met with a North Korean leader. But it was an ex-president, Jimmy Carter, who negotiated a 1994 pact known as the Agreed Framework that was to provide energy assistance for North Korea in return for gradual denucleari­zation.

In October 2000, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright traveled to Pyongyang to meet with Kim Jong Il, father of the current leader. The expectatio­n was that her meeting would pave the way for a follow-up trip by President Clinton, to take place after the November election but before the inaugurati­on of a new president. The momentum was lost amid the confusion about hanging chads and eventually the presidency of George W. Bush.

As a scant consolatio­n prize to the North Koreans, Clinton did visit North Korea as an ex-president in 2009 to secure the release of American journalist­s Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who had been taken prisoner while reporting on the China-North Korea border. The North Koreans have used other arrested Americans effectivel­y as hostages, trying to elicit visits and engagement from powerful Americans.

Under the Bush administra­tion, the Agreed Framework collapsed. The North Koreans reached out repeatedly to get a meeting with Bush. They failed to get any high-level negotiatio­ns going with the United States and were frustrated that the nuclear issue was relegated to six-nation talks led by China.

Although Kim’s invitation to Trump and the president’s acceptance of the talks without preconditi­ons came as a shock to much of the world — dominating headlines amid the Russia investigat­ion and Trump’s alleged tangles with porn actress Stormy Daniels — North Korea has been laying the groundwork for Trump from the moment he was elected.

“Kim Jong Un is not some young, callow kid. He is a very shrewd character,” said Robert Carlin, a former CIA analyst and negotiator, now a visiting scholar at Stanford University. “I think the North Koreans have been on this course for months and months.”

With its Fourth of July test of an interconti­nental missile capable of reaching the continenta­l United States, and its powerful hydrogen bomb test in September, North Korea succeeded in getting Washington’s attention. Then in November, when Kim announced the country had completed the developmen­t of its nuclear arsenal, he signaled that he was ready to launch a new phase that included negotiatio­ns.

The North’s decision to participat­e in the Winter Olympics last month in South Korea essentiall­y coopted Seoul — a traditiona­l U.S. ally — in the role of an intermedia­ry with its own prestige on the line to make the talks succeed.

As though anticipati­ng a diplomatic breakthrou­gh, North Korea in 2016 named a seasoned negotiator, Ri Yong Ho, as foreign minister and just two weeks ago promoted another, Choe Son Hui, to a vice ministeria­l position. Meanwhile, the Trump administra­tion has been losing its experience­d hands, most notably with the recent retirement of the State Department’s top Korea specialist, Joseph Yun.

To the many North Korea analysts who were wringing their hands over a potentiall­y catastroph­ic war, if not a nuclear Armageddon, the potential talks come as a relief. But any relief is balanced by the worry that Trump, inexperien­ced in diplomacy and anxious for a foreign policy win, will be no match for the surprising­ly wily North Koreans.

“I think it is really dangerous,” said John Park, a North Korea specialist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

“It is one thing thinking you have a minefield map, and another to sprint through,” he added. If the meeting goes badly, both leaders could give up on diplomacy and “focus on more of the military options.”

Some specialist­s on North Korea hailed the proposed summit as the first opportunit­y the United States will have to meet with the only person in that country authorized to make a decision.

“We have gotten ourselves into a box, and the only way out is negotiatio­ns,” said Leon V. Sigal, a North Korea specialist who has participat­ed in backchanne­l talks with the North Koreans. Based on those talks, he says he believes “the North Koreans are looking for a fundamenta­l change in the nature of the relationsh­ip with the United States.”

Meanwhile, the White House spokeswoma­n, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, offered a tougher line Friday than she had a day earlier and suggested the summit might not actually happen.

“We’re not going to have this meeting take place until we see concrete actions that match the words and the rhetoric of North Korea,” Sanders told reporters. “We’ve accepted the invitation to talk based on them following through with concrete actions on the promises that they’ve made.”

Those include, she said, a promise to “denucleari­ze,” to stop nuclear and missile tests, and to accept U.S.South Korean military exercises.

North Korea’s 25 million people remain among the poorest and most isolated in Asia.

Kim, who took over in 2011 after the death of his father, has embraced a strategy he calls byungjin, Korean for parallel, of developing nuclear weapons at the same time as building the economy. Although Kim has succeeded in improving the economy by allowing more market activity, he has been limited by economic sanctions and the lack of access to internatio­nal financial institutio­ns.

Kim has agreed to freeze further nuclear and missile tests while talks are underway, but he hasn’t offered to eliminate his nuclear weapons program, which he has referred to as a “treasured sword.”

In repeated statements, the North Koreans have said they would give up their nuclear weapons only if the United States drops its “hostile policy” toward the country, which could include a demand for the withdrawal of thousands of U.S. troops from South Korea. Moreover, North Korea’s nuclear program today is sufficient­ly advanced that even a freeze would leave the country with enough plutonium to make 10 nuclear warheads.

So far it is unclear where the proposed meeting between Trump and Kim would take place. One possibilit­y would be for Trump to join South Korean President Moon Jae-in at a summit scheduled for late April in Panmunjom, the truce village in the demilitari­zed zone separating the Koreas.

Beijing also has been floated as a possible summit site, given how Trump repeatedly has praised China’s help pressuring Kim. But Kim has resented that pressure and may not want to elevate China’s importance in the relationsh­ip.

Joshua Stanton, an attorney who helped draft the North Korean sanctions law, says that by all means Trump must avoid a trip to Pyongyang.

“That would show that Kim Jong Un is controllin­g the event and dictating terms to the president of the United States,” he said.

 ?? Jung Yeon-je AFP/Getty Images ?? IN SEOUL, a TV news broadcast reports the agreed-to meeting between Kim Jong Un and President Trump.
Jung Yeon-je AFP/Getty Images IN SEOUL, a TV news broadcast reports the agreed-to meeting between Kim Jong Un and President Trump.

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