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
Tensions rise as Washington says NKorea tested its 1st ICBM
The United States asserted Tuesday that North Korea’s latest missile launch was indeed an intercontinental ballistic missile, as the North had boasted and the U.S. and South Korea had feared. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the development – the North’s first test launch of a missile capable of reaching the U.S. – a “new escalation of the threat” to the U.S. and the world. In a show of force directly responding to North Korea’s provocation, U.S. and South Korean soldiers fired “deep strike” precision missiles into South Korean territorial waters on Tuesday, U.S. military officials in Seoul said. The missile firings demonstrated U.S.-South Korean solidarity, the U.S. Eighth Army said in a statement. At the request of the U.S., Japan and South Korea, the United Nations Security Council was to hold an emergency session on Wednesday afternoon. Tillerson said that was part of a U.S. response that would include “stronger measures to hold the DPRK accountable,” using an acronym for the isolated nation’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “Global action is required to stop a global threat,” Tillerson said. “Any country that hosts North Korean guest workers, provides any economic or military benefits, or fails to fully implement UN Security Council resolutions is aiding and abetting a dangerous regime.” He said the U.S. “will never accept a nuclear-armed North Korea.” Tillerson’s statement, issued Tuesday evening as most Americans were celebrating the Fourth of July holiday, notably did not mention China, whose help the Trump administration has been aggressively seeking to press Pyongyang over its nuclear weapons program. In recent days, as the North has continued to test missiles in defiance of global pressure, President Donald Trump has started voicing doubt that Beijing is up to the task. His administration has taken a number of steps against China’s interests that have suggested its patience has run short. Tillerson’s comments were the first public confirmation by the United States that the missile was indeed an ICBM, constituting a major technological advancement for the North and its most successful missile test yet. The prime danger from the U.S. viewpoint is the prospect of North Korea pairing a nuclear warhead with an ICBM. The latest US intelligence assessment is that the North probably does not yet have that capability – putting a small-enough nuclear warhead atop an ICBM. Initial U.S. military assessments had been that it was an intermediate-range missile. NORAD, or the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said the missile did not pose a threat to North America. Trump, in his initial response to the launch on Monday evening, urged China on Twitter to “put a heavy move on North Korea and end this nonsense once and for all!” But he also said it was “hard to believe” that South Korea and Japan, the two U.S. treaty allies most at risk from North Korea, would “put up with this much longer.” The U.S. mission to the United Nations said that U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley had requested that the Security Council meet urgently along with the U.N. envoys from Japan and South Korea. The 3 p.m. meeting Wednesday was to be held “in the open chamber,” rather than behind closed doors. Previously, North Korea had demonstrated missiles of short and medium range, but never one able to get to the U.S. The launch was not wholly unexpected. Daniel Coats, director of national intelligence, testified to Congress in May that the U.S. anticipated an ICBM test before the end of this year. The Pentagon has spent tens of billions of dollars developing a missile defense system tailored to the North Korean ambition of attaining the eventual capability to attack the U.S. with a nuclear-armed missile. On May 30 the Pentagon successfully shot down a mock warhead designed to replicate the North Korean threat. Pentagon spokeswoman Dana W. White said the U.S.-South Korea missile exercise Tuesday was meant to show “our precision fire capability. “We remain prepared to defend ourselves and our allies and to use the full range of capabilities at our disposal against the growing threat from North Korea,” she said in a statement. “The United States seeks only the peaceful denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Our commitment to the defense of our allies, the Republic of Korea and Japan, in the face of these threats, remains ironclad.” Since he entered the White House, Trump has talked about confronting Pyongyang and pushing China to increase pressure on the North, but neither strategy has produced fast results. The White House has been threatening to move forward on its own, though administration officials have not settled on next steps. Patrick Cronin, an Asia expert with the Center for a New American Security, said Trump was probably “coming to the point of no return” with North Korea, adding that the upshot could be diplomatic overtures or military action. “We either go to the diplomatic table with Kim Jong Un or we do take some course of action,” Cronin said. “In all probability we do both.” Trump spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Monday, discussing North Korea and its nuclear program with both leaders. He will meet them both this week at the Group of 20 meeting in Germany, as well as have his first meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump and Xi emerged from their first meeting – in April at the U.S. president’s Florida estate – seemingly as fast friends. But China has long resisted intensifying economic pressure on neighboring North Korea, in part out of fear of the instability that could mount on its doorstep, and Trump has not found a way to break through Beijing’s old habits. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
