Mike Rogers calls for more resources for missile defense after North Korea test fires missile
On Monday, Congressman Mike Rogers, the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, called for the United States to increase missile defense assets after North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). “The recent North Korean ICBM test is a stark reminder that Kim Jong Un is an unstable dictator with a growing nuclear arsenal capable of ranging the U.S. homeland,” Rep. Rogers said. “Protecting the U.S. homeland must be paramount as we develop our 2024 budget, and this includes fully-funding homeland missile defense assets. What has to be done is clear – we must accelerate our missile defense development to outpace the DPRK threat. This includes speeding up the Next Generation Interceptor, putting more interceptors in the ground, and looking to space-based missile defenses.” North Korea test-launched a missile on Saturday with a stated goal of demonstrating the country’s ability to use nuclear force against South Korea, Japan, and the USA. North Korea claims its nuclear forces can destroy South Korea and even American cities. Many western experts are skeptical of North Korea’s actual capability. No one doubts that North Korea has nuclear bombs or that it has missiles that could hit South Korea, Japan, or the U.S. mainland. What is not known is whether or not the North Koreans have the ability to load their nuclear bombs on their missiles. North Korea has three ICBMs in its growing arsenal. Saturday’s test was the Hwasong-15. It also has the Hwasong-14 and Hwasong-17. Korea claims that all three are nuclear-capable. North Korean state media claimed that the missile reached a maximum altitude of about 3,585 miles and flew 615 miles. The North Korean state-controlled media claimed the missile could travel 8,080 miles or beyond if launched on a normal trajectory. North Korea’s Yongbyon complex has facilities to produce both plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the two main ingredients for building nuclear weapons. North Korea has been a problem for the U.S. since Kim Jong Un’s grandfather invaded South Korea in 1950, sparking the Korean War. The peace treaty that ended the war left the two Koreas divided. South Korea has grown increasingly prosperous and a member of the global community, while North Korea has grown totalitarian and Stalinist. The country has developed nuclear weapons to stay relevant on the global stage and extract concessions from the global community. President Donald Trump attempted peaceful negotiations to convince Kim to give up his nuclear weapons and to tone down the rhetoric, but those talks with North Korea ultimately failed in 2019. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency is headquartered at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. Thousands of Alabamians work in missile defense both for the military and its many civilian contractors in the state. Mike Rogers is in his eleventh term representing Alabama’s Third Congressional District. Rogers is an attorney who previously served in the Alabama House of Representatives and on the Calhoun County Commission. To connect with the author of this story or to comment, email brandonmreporter@gmail.com.
Donald Trump reasserts GOP dominance as others focus on midterms
Leading Republicans spent much of three days avoiding Donald Trump’s chief grievances or ignoring him altogether as they unified behind a midterm message designed to win back the voters the polarizing former president alienated while in office. But by the end of the four-day Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump had reminded those who want to move on that he remains the most powerful voice in Republican politics. In his keynote address Saturday night, Trump indicated he planned to run for president a third time in 2024. He falsely blamed his 2020 election loss on widespread voter fraud, for which there is no evidence. And on Sunday, he was the overwhelming winner of a presidential preference straw poll of conference attendees. “We did it twice, and we’ll do it again,” Trump said of running in 2024. Even so, he has teased about a 2024 campaign before, and his vow this time was not necessarily ironclad. As invading Russian troops battled with Ukrainian forces, Trump also described Russian President Vladimir Putin as “smart.” “Of course he’s smart,” Trump said in his remarks Saturday, doubling down on praise of the Russian leader that many other Republicans have avoided after the invasion. “But the real problem is our leaders are dumb. Dumb. So dumb.” While Trump expressed support for the Ukrainian people and called the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a “brave man,” he also noted his ties with other leading autocrats. He specifically pointed to his friendly relationships with Xi Jinping of China and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Up until Trump’s appearance, lies about election fraud, the focus of last year’s conference, had been an afterthought among the top speakers. No one parroted Trump’s approving rhetoric toward Putin. And some leading Republicans didn’t even mention Trump’s name. Instead, those most likely to seek the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination not named Trump united behind an agenda that includes more parental control of schools, opposition to pandemic-related mandates, and a fierce rejection of “woke” culture. The message from more than a half-dozen elected officials, delivered to thousands of mostly white activists at an event that usually celebrates far-right rhetoric, does not mean the party has turned its back on Trumpism. Far from it. The former president was a frequent topic among some of the conference’s lower-profile speakers. T-shirts proclaiming “Trump won” were being sold in the hallways. And in the straw poll of 2,574 conference attendees, Trump earned 59%, followed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis with 28%. No one else had more than 2%. When asked for their preference should Trump not run in 2024, DeSantis earned 61%, with no one else earning more than 6% of the vote. The straw poll only measured the opinion of those at the conference, not broader Republican sentiment. Aside from Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was a crowd favorite throughout the four-day conference. Audience members applauded almost every time his name was mentioned, or his picture appeared on big screens. Conference organizer Matt Schlapp said Trump remains a dominant force, but he does not have a lock on the party’s base. “No. 1 is, Does he run again? And it’s overwhelming that people want him to,” Schlapp said. “But there’s a diversity of opinion.” And while Trump’s most controversial supporters were generally given lower-profile speaking slots over the four-day program, they were not excluded. Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., appeared on a Saturday morning panel hours after being featured at a conference of pro-Trump white nationalists. Trump offered Taylor Greene a particularly warm shoutout during his speech as he ticked down the Republican officials in attendance. “I refuse to shut up,” Taylor Greene said earlier in the day during a brief appearance as she railed against “Democrat communists.” Despite Trump’s dominant place at the head of the Republican Party, other party leaders are increasingly optimistic they have found a forward-looking strategy to overcome pro-Trump extremism and expand the party’s appeal with control of Congress at stake in November. It’s essentially the same playbook that Virginia’s Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin used last fall when he won in the swing state by avoiding Trump and his biggest grievances, including the false notion that the 2020 presidential election was plagued by mass voter fraud. “There are people that perhaps have never voted the same way any of you have in a presidential race, and they’re really angry,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said Friday. “And that’s why I believe that for all the negative we’ve heard, the pendulum is swinging.” Democrats are clinging to paper-thin majorities in the House and Senate, and voter sentiment has swung in an ominous direction for them since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021. In an AP-NORC poll conducted Feb. 18-21, 70% of Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction. As few as 44% said the same in April 2021. Some leading Republicans seemed intent at CPAC on not helping Democrats by embracing Trump. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who tried to block the certification of Biden’s electoral victory after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, sidestepped a question about whether he would challenge Trump in a 2024 prospective matchup. “I’ve said I’m not planning to run for president,” Hawley said. He also declined to say whether he wants Trump to run again in 2024: “I never give him advice, including on this.” Hawley also said it was a mistake for Republicans like Trump to offer soft praise for Putin: “Putin is our enemy. Let’s be clear about that.” DeSantis, who has also refused to rule out a 2024 presidential bid should Trump run, did not mention the former president in his 20-minute address, focusing instead on his resistance to mask and vaccine mandates. Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, spoke about his work in the Trump administration, but he did not repeat his own recent flattering comments about Putin, in which he called the Russian leader “very capable” and said he has “enormous respect for him.” South Dakota Gov. Kristi
AP fact check: Donald Trump on North Korea, wages, climate; dem misfires
Straining for deals on trade and nukes in Asia, President Donald Trump hailed a meeting with North Korea’s leader that he falsely claimed President Barack Obama coveted, asserted a U.S. auto renaissance that isn’t and wrongly stated air in the U.S. is the cleanest ever as he dismissed climate change. He also ignored the reality in suggesting that nobody had implicated Saudi’s crown prince in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump’s own intelligence agencies and a United Nations investigator, in fact, have pointed a finger at the prince. The president’s misstatements over the weekend capped several days of extraordinary claims, including a false one accusing special counsel Robert Mueller of a crime and misrepresenting trade in multiple dimensions. Democratic presidential candidates, meantime, stepped forward for their first debates and tripped at times on issues dear to them: climate change, health care and immigration among them. A look at the misstatements: AUTOMAKERS TRUMP: “Many, many companies — including South Korea — but many companies are coming into the United States. … Car companies, in particular. They’re going to Michigan. They’re going to Ohio and North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Florida. … We hadn’t had a plant built in years — in decades, actually. And now we have many plants being built all throughout the United States — cars.” — remarks Sunday to Korean business leaders in Seoul. THE FACTS: Car companies are not pouring into the U.S. as Trump suggests, nor does he deserve all the credit for those that have moved here. He’s also wrong in saying that auto plants haven’t been built in decades. A number of automakers — Toyota, BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen among them — opened plants in recent decades, mostly in the South. Government statistics show that jobs in auto and parts manufacturing grew at a slower rate in the two-plus years since Trump took office than in the two prior years. Between January of 2017, when Trump was inaugurated, and May of this year, the latest figures available, U.S. auto and parts makers added 44,000 jobs, or a 4.6 percent increase, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.But in the two years before Trump took office, the industry added 63,600 manufacturing jobs, a 7.1 percent increase. The only automaker announcing plans to reopen a plant in Michigan is Fiat Chrysler, which is restarting an old engine plant to build three-row SUVs. It’s been planning to do so since before Trump was elected. GM is even closing two Detroit-area factories: one that builds cars and another that builds transmissions. Toyota is building a new factory in Alabama with Mazda, and Volvo opened a plant in South Carolina last year, but in each case, that was in the works before Trump took office. Automakers have made announcements about new models being built in Michigan, but no other factories have been reopened. Ford stopped building the Focus compact car in the Detroit suburb of Wayne last year, but it’s being replaced by the manufacture of a small pickup and a new SUV. That announcement was made in December 2016, before Trump took office.GM, meantime, is closing factories in Ohio and Maryland. Trump can plausibly claim that his policies have encouraged some activity in the domestic auto industry. Corporate tax cuts freed more money for investment, and potential tariff increases on imported vehicles are an incentive to build in the U.S. But when expansion does happen, it’s not all because of him. Fiat Chrysler has been planning the SUVs for several years and has been looking at expansion in the Detroit area, where it has unused building space and an abundant, trainable automotive labor force. Normally it takes at least three years for an automaker to plan a new vehicle. NORTH KOREA TRUMP: “President Obama wanted to meet, and Chairman Kim would not meet him. The Obama administration was begging for a meeting. They were begging for meetings constantly. And Chairman Kim would not meet with him.” — joint news conference Sunday with South Korea’s president in Seoul. THE FACTS: That’s not the case. While Obama came into his presidency saying he’d be willing to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and other U.S. adversaries “without preconditions,” he never publicly sought a meeting with Kim. Obama eventually met Cuba’s President Raul Castro and spoke to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani by phone but took a different stance with Kim in 2009 as North Korea was escalating missile and nuclear tests. “This is the same kind of pattern that we saw his father engage in, and his grandfather before that,” Obama said in 2013. “Since I came into office, the one thing I was clear about was, we’re not going to reward this kind of provocative behavior. You don’t get to bang your — your spoon on the table and somehow you get your way.” Ben Rhodes, who was on Obama’s national security team for both terms, tweeted: ?”Obama never sought a meeting with Kim Jong Un.” Trump has portrayed his diplomacy with Kim as happening due to a special personal chemistry and friendship, saying he’s in “no rush” to get Kim to commit fully to denuclearization. INCOME INEQUALITY TRUMP: “Blue-collar workers are doing fantastic. They’re the biggest beneficiary of the tax cuts, the blue collar.” — news conference Saturday at G-20 summit in Japan. THE FACTS: Wrong. While most middle-income taxpayers did see a tax cut this year, Trump’s tax cut clearly skewed to the wealthy rather than lower-income groups such as manufacturing workers, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. It found that taxpayers making $308,000 to $733,000 stood to benefit the most. The Joint Committee on Taxation separately found the tax cuts were particularly helpful to businesses and people making more than $100,000 annually. LARRY KUDLOW, White House economic adviser: “The United States economy is booming. It’s running at roughly 3 percent average since President Trump took office two and a half years ago. On this business about bad distribution, the blue-collar
The Art of the Walk? Summit collapse and Trump’s diplomacy
President Donald Trump framed the breakdown of his nuclear summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un as wisely knowing when “to walk.” But the stunning collapse revealed the limits of his unique brand of personal diplomacy and raised concerns about future efforts to disarm a global threat. Eyeing the history books and a much-needed political victory, Trump bet big on the two-day Vietnam summit only to be forced to explain away its sudden failure. The president and North Korea gave conflicting explanations of what went wrong, though the result actually was a relief to some critics and even some Trump supporters who feared he might give too much away in pursuit of a deal. Trump, the businessman who was elected in part on his boasts of deal-making prowess, said a proposed agreement was “ready to be signed.” But he said he refused to accept what he described as North Korean insistence that all U.S. sanctions be lifted without the North committing to eliminate its nuclear arsenal. “I’d much rather do it right than do it fast,” the president said. “We’re in position to do something very special.” The North said it had demanded only partial relief from the punishing sanctions. Trump had pushed for the summit, telling wary aides that his personal chemistry with North Korea’s young and reclusive leader outweighed any need for detailed, staff-level talks to iron out differences before either head of state set foot in Hanoi. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who along with his special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, had been leading the preparatory effort, said staff work had achieved some results but that negotiators had intentionally left some of the most contentious issues unresolved. “We were hoping we could take another big swing when the two leaders got together,” he told reporters as he flew from Vietnam to the Philippines after the summit collapsed. “We did. We made some progress. But we didn’t get as far as we would have hoped we would have gotten.” Pompeo noted that “when you are dealing with a country that is of the nature of North Korea, it is often the case that only the most senior leaders have the capacity to make those important decisions.” Echoing the refrain that “no deal is better than a bad deal” — often used during the Obama administration by critics of its Iran negotiations — there was relief in some quarters that the president had not impulsively agreed to concessions without much in return. “Kudos to him for walking away from the table,” said Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think-tank that has been highly skeptical of Trump’s efforts with Kim Jong Un. “No deal is, in fact, better than a bad deal.” And White House aides stressed that Trump stood strong. Some observers evoked the 1987 Reykjavík summit between Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, a meeting that ended without a nuclear weapons deal but laid the groundwork for a future agreement. Long-standing U.S. policy insists that American sanctions on North Korea will not be lifted until that country commits to, if not concludes, a complete, verifiable and irreversible end to its nuclear weapons program. Trump, who did not consult with allies South Korea and Japan before breaking off the talks, declined to restate that goal Thursday, saying he wanted to retain flexibility with Kim. But North Korea’s foreign minister, in a rare news conference, said that Trump wasted an opportunity that “may not come again” and that the North’s position wouldn’t change even if there was another round of dialogue. The failure in Hanoi laid bare a risk in Trump’s negotiating style: Preferring one-on-one meetings with his foreign counterparts, his administration doesn’t always do the staff-level advance work intended to make a summit more of a victory lap than a negotiation. “The developments over the past 48 hours highlight in stark fashion the inherent weaknesses of President Trump’s preference for summit diplomacy — international media spectacles that have failed to achieve substantial progress on the key issues, especially denuclearization,” said Paul Haenle, the director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy. Unsurprisingly, former Obama administration officials agreed. “At every step of the way, Trump has placed himself, rather than professionals, at the center of this process — and as a result, he’s been outmaneuvered every step of the way,” the National Security Action, a group of mainly Obama-era foreign policy practitioners, said in a statement. Michael Fuchs, who worked on Asian issues as a State Department official under Obama, said there should be no more summits until the two sides are ready to announce a concrete agreement. “Let the real negotiators from both sides get to work,” he said. “Until then, no more reality TV summitry.” One beneficiary of the Vietnam summit may have been the North Korean leader. The first Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore gave the reclusive nation’s leader an entry to the international stage. The second appeared to grant him the legitimacy his family has long desired. Kim, for the first time, affably parried with the international press without having to account for his government’s long history of oppression. He secured Trump’s support for the opening of a liaison office in Pyongyang, without offering any concessions of his own. Trump’s backing for that step toward normalization provided the sort of recognition the international community has long denied Kim’s government. Experts worried that the darker side of Kim’s leadership, was being brushed aside. That includes massive human rights abuses, prison camps filled with dissidents, an absence of religious and speech freedoms and the executions of government and military officials. Trump also appeared to accept the North Korean leader’s assertion that he had nothing to do with the 2017 death of Otto Warmbier, an American college student who was imprisoned for allegedly taking a propaganda poster while on a visit to the country. The president said he took Kim “at his word” that he was unaware of the mistreatment
No deal: Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un summit collapses over sanctions impasse
Talks between President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un collapsed Thursday after the two sides failed to bridge a standoff over U.S. sanctions, a dispiriting end to high-stakes meetings meant to disarm a global nuclear threat. Trump blamed the breakdown on North Korea’s insistence that all the punishing sanctions the U.S. has imposed on Pyongyang be lifted without the North committing to eliminate its nuclear arsenal. “Sometimes you have to walk,” Trump explained at a closing news conference after the summit was abruptly cut short. He said there had been a proposed agreement that was “ready to be signed.” “I’d much rather do it right than do it fast,” Trump said. “We’re in position to do something very special.” Mere hours after both nations had seemed hopeful of a deal, the two leaders’ motorcades roared away from the downtown Hanoi summit site within minutes of each other, their lunch canceled and a signing ceremony scuttled. The president’s closing news conference was hurriedly moved up, and he departed for Washington more than two hours ahead of schedule. The disintegration of talks came after Trump and Kim had appeared to be ready to inch toward normalizing relations between their still technically warring nations and as the American leader dampened expectations that their negotiations would yield an agreement by North Korea to take concrete steps toward ending a nuclear program that Pyongyang likely sees as its strongest security guarantee. In something of a role reversal, Trump had deliberately ratcheted down some of the pressure on North Korea, abandoning his fiery rhetoric and declaring that he wanted the “right deal” over a rushed agreement. For his part, Kim, when asked whether he was ready to denuclearize, had said, “If I’m not willing to do that I won’t be here right now.” The breakdown denied Trump a much-needed triumph amid growing domestic turmoil back home, including congressional testimony this week by his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who called Trump a “racist” and “con man” and claimed prior knowledge that WikiLeaks would release emails that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. North Korea’s state media made no immediate comment on the diplomatic impasse, and Kim remained in his locked-down hotel after leaving the summit venue. The North Korean leader was scheduled to meet with top Vietnamese leaders on Friday and leave Saturday on his armored train for the long return trip, through China, to North Korea. Trump insisted his relations with Kim remained warm, but he did not commit to having a third summit with the North Korean leader, saying a possible next meeting “may not be for a long time.” Though both he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said significant progress had been made in Hanoi, the two sides appeared to be galaxies apart on an agreement that would live up to U.S. stated goals. “Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn’t do that,” Trump told reporters. Kim, he explained, appeared willing to close his country’s main nuclear facility, the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center, if the sanctions were lifted. But that would leave him with missiles, warheads and weapon systems, Pompeo said. There are also suspected hidden nuclear fuel production sites around the country. “We couldn’t quite get there today,” Pompeo said, minimizing what seemed to be a chasm between the two sides. Longstanding U.S. policy has insisted that U.S. sanctions on North Korea would not be lifted until that country committed to, if not concluded, complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization. Trump declined to restate that goal Thursday, insisting he wanted flexibility in talks with Kim. “I don’t want to put myself in that position from the standpoint of negotiation,” he said. White House aides stressed that Trump stood strong, and some observers evoked the 1987 Reykjavík summit between Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, a meeting over nuclear weapons that ended without a deal but laid the groundwork for a future agreement. The failure in Hanoi laid bare a risk in Trump’s unpredictable negotiating style: Preferring one-on-one meetings with his foreign counterparts, his administration often eschews the staff-level work done in advance to assure a deal and envisions summits more as messaging opportunities than venues for hardline negotiation. There was disappointment and alarm in South Korea, whose liberal leader has been a leading orchestrator of the nuclear diplomacy and who needs a breakthrough to restart lucrative engagement projects with the impoverished North. Yonhap news agency said that the clock on the Korean Peninsula’s security situation has “turned back to zero” and diplomacy is now “at a crossroads.” The collapse was a dramatic turnaround from the optimism that surrounded the talks after the leaders’ dinner Wednesday and that had prompted the White House to list a signing ceremony on Trump’s official schedule for Thursday. The two leaders had seemed to find a point of agreement when Kim, who fielded questions from American journalists for the first time, was asked if the U.S. may open a liaison office in North Korea. Trump declared it “not a bad idea,” and Kim called it “welcomable.” Such an office would mark the first U.S. presence in North Korea and a significant grant to a country that has long been deliberately starved of international recognition. But questions persisted throughout the summit, including whether Kim was willing to make valuable concessions, what Trump would demand in the face of rising domestic turmoil and whether the meeting could yield far more concrete results than the leaders’ first summit, a meeting in Singapore less than a year ago that was long on dramatic imagery but short on tangible results. There had long been skepticism that Kim would be willing to give away the weapons his nation had spent decades developing and Pyongyang felt ensured its survival. But even after the summit ended, Trump praised Kim’s commitment to continue a moratorium on missile testing. Trump also said he believed the autocrat’s claim that he had nothing to do with the
Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un share smiles, dinner before nuke talks
U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un projected optimism Wednesday as they opened high-stakes talks about curbing Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, a problem that has bedeviled generations of leaders. The second summit between Trump and Kim came against the backdrop of the American president’s domestic troubles. As the leaders dined on steak and chocolate cake, Trump’s former personal attorney was readying explosive congressional testimony claiming the president is a “conman” who lied abut his business interests with Russia. The turmoil in Washington has escalated concerns that Trump, eager for an agreement, would give Kim too much and get too little in return. The leaders’ first meeting in June was heavy with historic pageantry but light on any enforceable agreements for North Korea to give up its nuclear arsenal. Still, both offered optimistic words before dinner. “A lot of things are going to be solved I hope,” Trump said as dinner began. “I think it will lead to a wonderful, really a wonderful situation long-term.” Kim said his country had long been “misunderstood” and viewed with “distrust.” “There have been efforts, whether out of hostility or not, to block the path that we intend to take,” he said. “But we have overcome all these and walked toward each other again and we’ve now reached Hanoi after 261 days” since their first meeting in Singapore. “We have met again here and I am confident that we can achieve great results that everyone welcomes,” he added. The leaders’ formal talks continue Thursday. Possible outcomes could include a peace declaration for the Korean War that the North could use to eventually push for the reduction of U.S. troops in South Korea, or sanctions relief that could allow Pyongyang to pursue lucrative economic projects with the South. Skeptics say such agreements would leave in place a significant portion of North Korea’s nuclear-tipped missiles while robbing the United States of its negotiating leverage going forward. Asked if this summit would yield a political declaration to end the Korean War, Trump told reporters: “We’ll see.” Trump’s schedule for Thursday promised a “joint agreement signing ceremony” after their meetings conclude. The two leaders were joined for dinner by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Kim Yong Chol, a former military spy chief and Kim’s point man in negotiations, and North Korean Foreign Affairs Minister Ri Yong Ho. Interpreters for each side also attended. Trump did not answer a question from a reporter about his former attorney Michael Cohen‘s congressional testimony. Shortly after, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders excluded some U.S. reporters, including the reporter from The Associated Press who asked the president about Cohen, from covering Trump and Kim’s dinner. “Due to the sensitive nature of the meetings we have limited the pool for the dinner to a smaller group,” she said in a statement. Still, Trump was unable to ignore the drama playing out thousands of miles away, tweeting that Cohen “did bad things unrelated to Trump” and “is lying in order to reduce his prison time.” Cohen has been sentenced to three years in prison for lying to Congress. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a close White House ally, said the Cohen hearing was evidence that “Democrats’ hatred of Trump is undercutting an important foreign policy effort and is way out of line.” Anticipation for what could be accomplished at the summit ran high in Hanoi, and there were cheers and gasps as Trump’s motorcade barreled through this bustling city. Crowds three or four deep lined the streets and jockeyed to capture his procession with their mobile phones. The carnival-like atmosphere in the Vietnamese capital, with street artists painting likenesses of the leaders and vendors hawking T-shirts showing Kim waving and Trump giving a thumbs-up, contrasted with the serious items on their agenda: North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and peace on the Korean Peninsula. Trump has been trying to convince Kim that his nation could thrive economically like the host country, Vietnam, if he would end his nuclear weapons program. “I think that your country has tremendous economic potential — unbelievable, unlimited,” Trump said. “I think that you will have a tremendous future with your country — a great leader — and I look forward to watching it happen and helping it to happen.” The summit venue, the colonial and neoclassical Sofitel Legend Metropole in the old part of Hanoi, came with its own dose of history: Trump was trying to talk Kim into giving up his nuclear arsenal at a hotel with a bomb shelter that protected the likes of actress Jane Fonda and singer Joan Baez from American air raids during the Vietnam War. After their first summit, where Trump and Kim signed a joint statement agreeing to work toward a denuclearized Korean Peninsula, the president prematurely declared victory, tweeting that “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” The facts did not support that claim. North Korea has spent decades, at great economic sacrifice, building its nuclear program, and there are doubts that it will give away that program without getting something substantial from the U.S. The Korean conflict ended in 1953 with an armistice, essentially a cease-fire signed by North Korea, China and the 17-nation, U.S.-led United Nations Command. A peace declaration would amount to a political statement, ostensibly teeing up talks for a formal peace treaty that would involve other nations. North and South Korea also want U.S. sanctions dialed back so they can resurrect two major symbols of rapprochement that provided $150 million a year to the impoverished North by some estimates: a jointly run factory park in the North Korean border city of Kaesong and South Korean tours to the North’s scenic Diamond Mountain resort. AP journalists Hau Dinh and Hyung-jin Kim in Hanoi and Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report. Republished with permission from the Associated Press.
Expectations low as Donald Trump looks for win in NKorea summit
President Donald Trump will head into his second meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un having reframed what would make a successful summit, lowering expectations for Pyongyang’s denuclearization while eager to declare a flashy victory to offset the political turmoil he faces at home. Trump was the driving force behind this week’s Vietnam summit, aiming to recreate the global spectacle of his first meeting with Kim, although that initial summit yielded few concrete results and the months that followed have produced little optimism about what will be achieved in the sequel. He once warned that North Korea’s arsenal posed such a threat to humanity that he may have no choice but to rain “fire and fury” on the rogue nation, yet on Sunday declared that he was in no hurry for Pyongyang to prove it was abandoning its weapons. “I’m not in a rush. I don’t want to rush anybody, I just don’t want testing. As long as there’s no testing, we’re happy,” Trump told a gathering of governors at the White House. Hours earlier, he ended a tweet about the summit by posing the key question that looms over their meeting in Vietnam: “Denuclearization?” He did not provide an answer. Though worries abound across world capitals about what Trump might be willing to give up in the name of a win, the president was ready to write himself into the history books before he and Kim even shake hands in Hanoi. “If I were not elected president, you would have been in a war with North Korea,” Trump said last week. “We now have a situation where the relationships are good — where there has been no nuclear testing, no missiles, no rockets.” Whatever the North Koreans have done so far, the survival of the Kim regime is always the primary concern. Kim inherited a nascent, incomplete nuclear program from his father, and after years of accelerated effort and fighting through crippling sanctions, he built an arsenal that demonstrates the potential capability to deliver a thermonuclear weapon to the mainland United States. That is the fundamental reason Washington now sits at the negotiating table. Kim, his world standing elevated after receiving an audience with a U.S. president, has yet to show a convincing sign that he is willing to deal away an arsenal that might provide a stronger guarantee of survival than whatever security assurance the United States could provide. The North Koreans have largely eschewed staff-level talks, pushing for discussions between Trump and Kim. Trump will arrive in Hanoi on Tuesday on Air Force One while his counterpart, lacking a modern aircraft fleet, travels via armored train. Though details of the summit remain closely held, the two leaders are expected to meet at some point one-on-one, joined only by translators. The easing of tension between the two nations, Trump and his allies believe, stems from the U.S. president’s own unorthodox and unpredictable style of diplomacy. Often prizing personal rapport over long-held strategic interests, Trump has pointed to his budding relationship with the young and reclusive leader, frequently showing visitors to the Oval Office his flattering letters from Kim. Trump, who has long declared that North Korea represented the gravest foreign threat of his presidency, told reporters recently that his efforts to defang Pyongyang had moved Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize, something Abe would not confirm or deny. And, always with an eye on his media coverage, Trump had delighted in the round-the-clock phenomenon created by the first Kim summit, held last June in Singapore. He urged reluctant aides as early as last fall to begin preparations for a second meeting. The images of the first face-to-face meeting between a U.S. president and his North Korean counterpart resonated across the globe. Four main goals emerged: establishing new relations between the nations, building a new peace on the Korean Peninsula, completing denuclearization of the peninsula and recovering U.S. POW/MIA remains from the Korean War. While some remains have been returned to the United States, little has been achieved on the other points. Korean and American negotiators have not settled on either the parameters of denuclearization or the timetable for the removal of both Korean weapons and American sanctions. “The key lessons of Singapore are that President Trump sees tremendous value in the imagery of diplomacy and wants to be seen as a bold leader, even if the substance of the diplomacy is far behind the pageantry,” said Abraham Denmark, director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. U.S. intelligence officials testified before Congress last month that it remains unlikely Kim would fully dismantle his arsenal. And many voices in the Trump administration, including national security adviser John Bolton, have expressed skepticism that North Korea would ever live up to a deal. Mark Chinoy, senior fellow at U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California, made clear that after generations of hostility, the convivial atmosphere of Singapore “can’t be discounted.” But Chinoy noted that Trump had agreed to North Korean’s “formulation of ‘denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,’ which Pyongyang has long made clear meant an end to the US security alliance with South Korea and an end to the US nuclear umbrella intended to defend South Korea and Japan.” After the last summit, Trump unilaterally suspended some military drills with South Korea, alarming some in Seoul and at the Pentagon. But he was insistent this week that he would not drawdown U.S. troops from South Korea. And American officials, even as they hint at a relaxed timetable for Pyongyang to account for its full arsenal, have continued to publicly insist they would not ease punishing sanctions on North Korea until denuclearization is complete. A year ago, North Korea suspended its nuclear and long-range missile tests and said it dismantled its nuclear testing ground but those measures were not perceived as meaningful reductions. Experts believe Kim, who is enjoying warmer relations with South Korea and the easing of
Possible peace declaration looms large over Donald Trump-Kim Jong Un summit
With their second summit fast approaching, speculation is growing that U.S. President Donald Trump may try to persuade North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to commit to denuclearization by giving him something he wants more than almost anything else: an announcement of peace and an end to the Korean War. Such an announcement could make history. It would be right in line with Trump’s opposition to “forever wars.” And, coming more than six decades after the fighting essentially ended, it just seems like common sense. But, if not done carefully, it could open up a whole new set of problems for Washington. Here’s why switching the focus of the ongoing talks between Pyongyang and Washington from denuclearization to peace would be a risky move — and why it might be exactly what Kim wants when the two leaders meet in Hanoi on Feb. 27-28. ___ THE STANDOFF The Korean Peninsula was divided at the 38th parallel after World War II, with the U.S. claiming a zone of influence in the south and the Soviet Union in the north. Within five years, the two Koreas were at war. Though the shooting stopped in 1953, the conflict ended with an armistice, essentially a cease-fire signed by North Korea, China and the 17-nation, U.S.-led United Nations Command that was supposed to be replaced by a formal peace treaty. But both sides instead settled ever deeper into Cold War hostilities marked by occasional outbreaks of violence. The conflict in Korea is technically America’s longest war. North Korea, which saw all of its major cities and most of its infrastructure destroyed by U.S. bombers during the war, blames what it sees as Washington’s unrelenting hostility over the past 70 years as ample justification for its nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. It claims they are purely for self-defense. The U.S., on the other hand, maintains a heavy military presence in South Korea to counter what it says is the North’s intention to invade and assimilate the South. It has also implemented a long-standing policy of ostracizing the North and backing economic sanctions. Trump escalated the effort to squeeze the North with a “maximum pressure” strategy that remains in force. A combination of that strategy and the North’s repeated tests of missiles believed capable of delivering its nuclear weapons to the U.S. mainland are what brought the two countries to the negotiating table. ___ WHY KIM WANTS A TREATY Getting a formal peace treaty has been high on the wish list of every North Korean leader, starting with Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung. A peace treaty would bring international recognition, probably at least some easing of trade sanctions, and a likely reduction in the number of U.S. troops south of the Demilitarized Zone. If done right, it would be a huge boost to Kim’s reputation at home and abroad. And, of course, to the cause of peace on the Korean Peninsula at a time when Pyongyang says it is trying to shift scarce resources away from defense so that it can boost its standard of living and modernize its economy with a greater emphasis on science and technology. Washington has a lot to gain, too. Trump has said he would welcome a North Korea that is more focused on trade and economic growth. Stability on the peninsula is good for South Korea’s economy and probably for Japan’s as well. Though Trump hasn’t stressed human rights, eased tensions could create the space needed for the North to loosen its controls over political and individual freedoms. But it’s naive to expect North Korea to suddenly change its ways. According to a recent estimate, it has over the past year continued to expand its nuclear stockpile. And even as it has stepped up its diplomatic overtures to the outside world, Pyongyang has doubled down internally on demanding loyalty to its totalitarian system. ___ PEACE OR APPEASEMENT? After his first summit with Kim, in Singapore last June, Trump declared the nuclear threat was over. He isn’t saying that anymore. Trump made no mention of the word “denuclearization” during his State of the Union address. Instead, he called his effort a “historic push for peace on the Korean Peninsula” and stressed that Kim hasn’t conducted any recent nuclear or missile tests and has released Americans who had been jailed in the North and returned the remains of dozens of Americans killed in the war. Kim, meanwhile, has good reason to want to turn his summits with Trump into “peace talks.” The biggest win for the North would be to get a peace declaration while quietly abandoning denuclearization altogether, or by agreeing to production caps or other measures that would limit, but not eliminate, its nuclear arsenal. Simply having a summit without a clear commitment to denuclearization goes a long way toward establishing him as the leader of a de facto nuclear state. Unless Washington is willing to accept him as such, that will only make future talks all the more difficult. The U.S. has, however, continued to take a hard line in lower-level negotiations leading up to the summit. Stephen Biegun, Trump’s new point man on North Korea, stressed in a recent speech that as a prerequisite for peace, Washington wants a “complete understanding of the full extent of the North Korean weapons of mass destruction missile programs,” expert access and monitoring of key sites and, ultimately, “the removal and destruction of stockpiles of fissile material, weapons, missiles, launchers, and other weapons of mass destruction.” The question is whether Trump will similarly challenge Kim or choose an easier and splashier — but less substantive — declaration of peace. ___ TALK VS TREATY If he chose to do so, Trump could unilaterally announce the end of the Korean War. It would be great TV. But it wouldn’t necessarily mean all that much. Trump can’t by himself conclude an actual peace treaty. China, and possibly a representative of the U.N. Command, would have to be involved. South Korea would naturally want
Donald Trump-Kim Jong Un summit to focus on North Korea nuke complex
When President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un first met in Singapore last year, there was pomp, there was circumstance, but there wasn’t much substance. Before they meet again in Vietnam on Feb. 27-28, there’s growing pressure that they forge a deal that puts them closer to ending the North Korean nuclear weapons threat. But what could that look like? Kim may be willing to dismantle his main nuclear complex. The U.S. may be willing to cough up concessions, maybe remove some sanctions. The question, however, is whether what’s on offer will be enough for the other side. Here’s a look at what each side could be looking for as Trump and Kim try to settle a problem that has bedeviled generations of policymakers. ___ DESTROYING A NUKE COMPLEX The North’s Yongbyon (sometimes spelled Nyongbyon) nuclear complex, located about 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Pyongyang, has facilities that produce both plutonium and uranium, two key ingredients in nuclear weapons. North Korea’s state media have called the complex of a reported 390 buildings “the heart of our nuclear program.” After a September meeting with Kim, South Korean President Moon Jae-in told reporters that Kim promised to dismantle the complex if the United States takes unspecified corresponding steps. Stephen Biegun, the U.S. special representative for North Korea, recently said that Kim also committed to the dismantlement and destruction of North Korea’s plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities when he met visiting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last October. Since fresh diplomatic efforts began last year, the North has suspended nuclear and missile tests and dismantled its nuclear testing site and parts of its long-range rocket launch facility. But destroying the Yonbgyon complex would be Kim’s biggest disarmament step yet and would signal his resolve to move forward in negotiations with Trump. There is worry among some, however, that the complex’s destruction won’t completely dispel widespread skepticism about North Korea denuclearization commitments. It would still have an estimated arsenal of as many as 70 nuclear weapons and more than 1,000 ballistic missiles. North Korea is also believed to be running multiple undisclosed uranium-enrichment facilities. “We could call (Yongbyon’s destruction) a half-deal or a small-deal,” said Nam Sung-wook, a professor at Korea University and a former president of the Institute for National Security Strategy, a think tank affiliated with South Korea’s main spy agency. “It’s really an incomplete denuclearization step” that matches past tactics meant to slow disarmament steps so it can win a series of concessions. ___ U.S. REWARDS To get the North to commit to destroying the Yongbyon complex, some experts say Trump needs to make important concessions. Those would likely need to include jointly declaring an end of the 1950-53 Korean War, opening a liaison office in Pyongyang, allowing North Korea to restart some economic projects with South Korea and possibly easing some sanctions on the North. Kim may most want sanctions relief to revive his country’s dilapidated economy and bolster his family’s dynastic rule. “For North Korea, abandoning the Yongbyon complex is a fairly big (negotiating) card … so the North will likely try to win some economic benefits,” said Chon Hyun-joon, president of the Institute of Northeast Asia Peace Cooperation Studies in South Korea. At the Singapore summit, Kim and Trump agreed to establish new relations between their countries and build a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula. But they didn’t elaborate on how to pursue those goals. North Korea has since complained about the lack of action by the United States, saying it already took disarmament steps, and returned American detainees and the remains of American war dead. The U.S. for its part suspended some of its military drills with South Korea, a concession to North Korea, which calls the exercises dress rehearsal for invasion. Kim and Moon agreed at the first of their three summits in 2018 to settle an end-of-war declaration. Moon said last month it could ease mutual hostility between Washington and Pyongyang, and accelerate North Korea’s denuclearization. But some worry that a declaration ending the Korean War, which was stopped by an armistice and has yet to be replaced with a peace treaty, might provide North Korea with a stronger basis to call for the withdrawal of 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea. In his New Year’s address, Kim also said he was ready to resume operations at a jointly run factory park in the North Korean border town of Kaesong and restart South Korean tours to the North’s Diamond Mountain resort. Those are two of the now-dormant inter-Korean projects that supplied badly needed foreign currency for the impoverished North. ___ A BREAKTHROUGH? To make the Vietnam summit a blockbuster, Trump will likely need more than Yongbyon. A bigger deal would see a detailed accounting of North Korea’s nuclear assets, and possibly shipping some North Korean nuclear bombs or long-range missiles out of the country for disabling. That would be costly. North Korea would likely demand a drastic easing of sanctions and a resumption of exports of coal and other mineral resources. A North Korean declaration of its nuclear program would provide invaluable information, if verified by U.S. intelligence, to Washington and others. It would offer looks at hidden nuclear fuel facilities and missile deployments, which is why Pyongyang has been reluctant to provide it. According to South Korean and other assessments, Yongbyon alone is estimated to have 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of weaponized plutonium, enough for six to 10 bombs, and a highly enriched uranium inventory of 250 to 500 kilograms (550 to 1,100 pounds), sufficient for 25 to 30 nuclear devices. Undisclosed uranium enrichment facilities would up the stockpile. Because of the difficulty involved, Trump may want to focus on the North’s long-range missiles, which could, when perfected, pose a direct threat to the U.S. mainland. But such a partial deal would rattle many in South Korea and Japan, which are well within striking distance of North Korea’s short- and medium-range missiles. If lower level officials can’t lay
Donald Trump calls for end of resistance politics in State of Union
Facing a divided Congress for the first time, President Donald Trump on Tuesday called on Washington to reject “the politics of revenge, resistance and retribution.” He warned emboldened Democrats that “ridiculous partisan investigations” into his administration and businesses could hamper a surging American economy. Trump’s appeals for bipartisanship in his State of the Union address clashed with the rancorous atmosphere he has helped cultivate in the nation’s capital — as well as the desire of most Democrats to block his agenda during his next two years in office. Their opposition was on vivid display as Democratic congresswomen in the audience formed a sea of white in a nod to early 20th-century suffragettes. Trump spoke at a critical moment in his presidency, staring down a two-year stretch that will determine whether he is re-elected or leaves office in defeat. His speech sought to shore up Republican support that had eroded slightly during the recent government shutdown and previewed a fresh defense against Democrats as they ready a round of investigations into every aspect of his administration. “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation,” he declared. Lawmakers in the cavernous House chamber sat largely silent. Looming over the president’s address was a fast-approaching Feb. 15 deadline to fund the government and avoid another shutdown. Democrats have refused to acquiesce to his demands for a border wall, and Republicans are increasingly unwilling to shut down the government to help him fulfill his signature campaign pledge. Nor does the GOP support the president’s plan to declare a national emergency if Congress won’t fund the wall. Wary of publicly highlighting those intraparty divisions, Trump made no mention of an emergency declaration in his remarks, though he did offer a lengthy defense of his call for a border wall. But he delivered no ultimatums about what it would take for him to sign legislation to keep the government open. “I am asking you to defend our very dangerous southern border out of love and devotion to our fellow citizens and to our country,” he said. Trump devoted much of his speech to foreign policy, another area where Republicans have increasingly distanced themselves from the White House. He announced details of a second meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, outlining a summit on Feb. 27 and 28 in Vietnam. The two met last summer in Singapore, though that meeting only led to a vaguely worded commitment by the North to denuclearize. As he stood before lawmakers, the president was surrounded by symbols of his emboldened political opposition. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was praised by Democrats for her hard-line negotiating during the shutdown, sat behind Trump as he spoke. And several senators running for president were also in the audience, including Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey. Another Democratic star, Stacey Abrams, will deliver the party’s response to Trump. Abrams narrowly lost her bid in November to become America’s first black female governor, and party leaders are aggressively recruiting her to run for U.S. Senate from Georgia. In excerpts released ahead of Abrams’ remarks, she calls the shutdown a political stunt that “defied every tenet of fairness and abandoned not just our people, but our values.” Trump’s address amounted to an opening argument for his re-election campaign. Polls show he has work to do, with his approval rating falling to just 34 percent after the shutdown, according to a recent survey conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. One bright spot for the president has been the economy, which has added jobs for 100 straight months. He said the U.S. has “the hottest economy anywhere in the world.” He said, “The only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics or ridiculous partisan investigations” an apparent swipe at the special counsel investigation into ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign, as well as the upcoming congressional investigations. The diverse Democratic caucus, which includes a bevy of women, sat silently for much of Trump’s speech. But they leapt to their feet when he noted there are “more women in the workforce than ever before.” The increase is due to population growth — and not something Trump can credit to any of his policies. Turning to foreign policy, another area where Republicans have increasingly been willing to distance themselves from the president, Trump defended his decisions to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan. “Great nations do not fight endless wars,” he said, adding that the U.S. is working with allies to “destroy the remnants” of the Islamic State group and that he has “accelerated” efforts to reach a settlement in Afghanistan. IS militants have lost territory since Trump’s surprise announcement in December that he was pulling U.S. forces out, but military officials warn the fighters could regroup within six months to a year of the Americans leaving. Several leading GOP lawmakers have sharply criticized his plans to withdraw from Syria, as well as from Afghanistan. Trump’s guests for the speech include Anna Marie Johnson, a woman whose life sentence for drug offenses was commuted by the president, and Joshua Trump, a sixth-grade student from Wilmington, Delaware, who has been bullied over his last name. They sat with first lady Melania Trump during the address. Republished with permission from the Associated Press
Moon Jae-In to carry private message from Kim Jong Un to Donald Trump
A beaming South Korean President Moon Jae-in, freshly returned home Thursday from a whirlwind three-day summit with Kim Jong Un, said the North Korean leader wants the U.S. secretary of state to visit Pyongyang soon for nuclear talks, and also hopes for a quick follow-up to his June summit with President Donald Trump. Only hours after standing with Kim on the peak of a volcano that’s at the heart of Kim dynasty propaganda, Moon told reporters in Seoul that he will be carrying a private message from Kim to Trump about the nuclear standoff when he meets the U.S. president in New York next week on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session. Both Trump, who has repeatedly spoken of his good relationship with Kim, and the North Korean leader have expressed a desire to follow up on the June meeting in Singapore that was meant to settle an impasse that seemed to be edging toward war last year. But there are worries among observers about whether Kim is as committed to denuclearization as he claims. Moon faces increasing pressure from Washington to find a path forward in efforts to get Kim to completely — and unilaterally — abandon his nuclear arsenal, which is thought to be closing in on the ability to accurately target any part of the continental United States. “There are things that the United States wants us to convey to North Korea, and on the other side there are also things that North Korea wants us to convey to the United States,” Moon said at a press center in Seoul where reporters had watched parts of his summit with Kim on huge video screens that occasionally showed live streams from Pyongyang. “I will faithfully serve that role when I meet President Trump to facilitate dialogue between North Korea and the United States.” Moon, who set up the Singapore summit and is eager for another to happen, also told reporters that he’ll convey to Trump his and Kim’s desire to get a declaration on ending the Korean War by the end of this year. The war still technically continues because it ended in 1953 with a cease-fire, not a peace treaty. An end-of-war declaration would be the first step toward an eventual formal peace treaty, but the United States is wary about signing off on something that could result in Kim pushing for the removal of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea to deter the North. Earlier Thursday, Kim and Moon took to the road for the final day of their summit, hiking to the peak of Mount Paektu, which is considered sacred in the North, their hands clasped and raised in a pose of triumph. Their trip to the mountain on the North Korean-Chinese border, and the striking photo-op that will resonate in both Koreas, followed the announcement of wide-ranging agreements on Wednesday that they trumpeted as a major step toward peace. However, their premier accord on the issue that most worries the world — the North’s pursuit of nuclear-tipped missiles — contained a big condition: Kim stated that he would permanently dismantle North Korea’s main nuclear facility only if the United States takes unspecified corresponding measures. “Chairman Kim Jong Un has again and again affirmed his commitment to denuclearization,” Moon said after returning to Seoul. “He expressed his wish to finish a complete denuclearization as soon as possible and focus on economic development.” Moon said North Korea’s agreement to allow international experts to observe a “permanent” dismantling of a missile engine test site and launch pad was the same thing as a commitment to “verifiably and irreversibly” demolish those facilities. Moon says such steps, combined with North Korea’s unilateral but unverified dismantling of a nuclear testing ground earlier this year, would prevent the North from advancing its weaponry through further nuclear and missile tests. Experts say the destruction of the missile engine test site and launch pad wouldn’t represent a material step in the denuclearization of North Korea, which declared its nuclear force complete last year and has designed its most powerful missiles to be fired from vehicles. Moon also said that Kim hoped to visit Seoul soon. “I wish there would be an opportunity for my fellow citizens to see Chairman Kim Jong Un for themselves and hear him talking about the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, peace and prosperity with his own voice,” the South Korean president said. Earlier in the day, the leaders smiled broadly as they posed at the summit of Paektu, their wives grinning at their sides, a brilliant blue sky and the deep crater lake that tops the volcano in the background. They also toured the shores of the lake, where Moon and his wife filled bottles with its water and a South Korean pop singer delivered for the leaders a rendition of a beloved Korean folk song, “Arirang,” which is used in both Koreas as an unofficial anthem for peace. The mountain is important to the Kim family, members of which are referred to as sharing the “Paektu bloodline,” and the volcano is emblazoned on North Korea’s national emblem and lends its name to everything from rockets to power stations. Many South Koreans also feel drawn to the volcano, which, according to Korean mythology, was the birthplace of Dangun, the founder of the first ancient Korean kingdom, and has long been considered one of the most beautiful places on the peninsula. Not everyone was pleased, though. About 100 anti-North Korea protesters rallied in central Seoul to express anger about the summit and displayed slogans that read, “No to SK-NK summit that benefits Kim Jong Un.” The leaders are basking in the glow of the joint statement they signed Wednesday. Compared to the vague language of their two earlier summits, Kim and Moon seem to have agreed on an ambitious program meant to tackle soaring tensions that caused many to fear war last year as the North tested a string of increasingly powerful weapons. Both leaders also
Trade rocks already unstable U.S., China relations
President Donald Trump’s trade battle with China will exacerbate relations with Beijing that are already fraying on several fronts as the U.S. takes a more confrontational stance and an increasingly powerful China stands its ground. The gloves came off Friday as the world’s two largest economies imposed tariffs on billions of dollars of each other’s goods amid a spiraling dispute over technology. It comes at a time when Washington needs China’s help in ending its nuclear standoff with North Korea. Trump’s much-vaunted personal rapport with Chinese President Xi Jinping, whom he hosted at his Mar-a-Lago resort three months after taking office, won’t help patch up differences, experts and former officials say. “The notion that there’s a personal relationship which will somehow supersede China’s strategic interests and the well-being of the Communist Party — including its ability to manage its own economy consistent with its political interests — is absurd,” said Daniel Russel, top U.S. diplomat for East Asia under President Barack Obama. “There’s no scenario in which an affectionate relationship, real or imagined, is going to stay Xi’s hand,” Russel said. Troubles in the bilateral relationship go beyond trade. China has chafed about the scope of U.S. relations with Taiwan; U.S. complaints about its construction of military outposts on islands in the South China Sea; tougher screening of Chinese investment in the U.S.; visa restrictions; and accusations that it’s the main source of opioids. If not new, these are now deepening sources of tension between Washington and Beijing. Even as Trump has sought to cultivate his relationship with the increasingly dominant Chinese leader, his administration has chosen to confront an increasingly defiant China on pretty much all them. It also identified China, along with Russia, as a threat in the most recent U.S. National Security Strategy. In response, Beijing is hanging tough. “China has made it abundantly clear that it will never surrender to blackmail or coercion,” Chinese state news agency Xinhua said Friday. To what extent the trade tensions bleed into other aspects of the U.S.-China relationship, which has retained a mostly upward trajectory since the normalization of ties four decades ago, remains to be seen. But Mike Pillsbury, director of the Center for Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute, said U.S.-China relations are headed into “uncharted waters.” Recently returned from a visit to China, Pillsbury said he was told by government officials and businessmen that they were confused about what the Trump administration wanted them to do to get the U.S. to ease the trade tensions. They threatened to back off assisting the U.S. nuclear talks with North Korea. “They explicitly said that,” according to Pillsbury, who has written three books on China and has advised the Trump administration. “They said we will help you (the U.S.) less with North Korea if you start a trade war with us on July 6. Pretty clear, huh?” China has, in fact, already distanced itself somewhat from its significant cooperation with the U.S. on North Korea. After supporting tough U.N. sanctions and scaling back trade with the North after it ramped up nuclear and missile tests last year, Beijing has eased restrictions on its neighbor. That shift began after Trump in March abruptly decided to hold a summit with Kim Jong Un. Once again, China has again focused on rekindling its traditional alliance with Pyongyang — Xi has met Kim three times this year. Abraham Denmark, a former senior U.S. defense official on Asia, said China has welcomed Trump’s sudden shift from confrontation to diplomacy with North Korea and also his decision to halt large-scale military exercises with close U.S. ally South Korea. Yet China also views what happens with North Korea through the lens of the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and China, he said. North Korea long served as a buffer against America’s expanding its reach in Northeast Asia to China’s border. “If the U.S. is going to engage in a trade war, which is very troubling for China, politically, it’s going to reduce their willingness to cooperate on North Korea,” he said. Denmark, who is now director of the Asia program at the Wilson Center think tank, warned of a broader deterioration in relations, as Trump pursues more aggressive policies toward Beijing, and China stakes out a position as world player unwilling to be pushed around. “China under Xi Jinping has been more aggressive in its pursuit of its interests. I expect we’re going to see more tensions across the board: in trade, the South China Sea, Taiwan, Korea,” Denmark said. “These are all part of the same story, which is that China is feeling more confident and powerful, and more willing to accept friction and tension in the pursuit of its interests.” On recent trip to China, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis did some damage mitigation, talking up the importance of military cooperation despite his earlier decision to withdraw an invite for China to participate in a U.S.-led multinational naval exercise over its activities in the disputed South China Sea. Xi struck a similar note, calling military ties a “model component of our overall bilateral relations.” That may help to ward off the possibilities of unintended conflict between the two militaries, but it will not prevent a growing rift on other issues. The United States accuses China of using predatory tactics in a push to supplant American technological dominance. The tactics include forcing U.S. companies to hand over technology in exchange for access to the Chinese market, as well as outright cyber-theft. Trump’s tariffs are meant to pressure Beijing to reform its trade policies. On Friday, the Trump administration imposed tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese products. Within hours, China retaliated with taxes on an equal amount of U.S. products, including soybeans, pork and electric cars. Russel said that ultimately the Trump administration’s issuing of demands of China on trade and other issues could harden attitudes inside the country, weakening the hands of reformers and strengthening nationalists who vilify the United States. “The net effect of
