Trump, N. Korea to meet
Hastily called summit to take place within weeks; location not determined
WASHINGTON — North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, has invited President Donald Trump to meet for negotiations over its nuclear program, an audacious diplomatic overture that would bring together two strong-willed, idiosyncratic leaders who have traded threats of war.
The White House said Trump had accepted the invitation, and Chung Eui-yong, a South Korean official who conveyed it, told reporters that Trump would meet with Kim within two months.
“He expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible,” Chung said at the White House on Thursday evening after meeting the president. Trump, he said, agreed to “meet Kim Jong Un by May to achieve permanent denuclearization.”
Trump expressed his optimism about the meeting in a post on Twitter, saying that Kim had “talked about denuclearization with the South Korean Representatives, not just a freeze.”
“Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time,” the president added. “Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached. Meeting being planned!”
Chung noted that Kim also said that he understood that joint military exercises with the United States and South Korea would go ahead as scheduled after the end of the Paralympic Games this month.
For Trump, a meeting with Kim,
a leader he has threatened with “fire and fury” and derided as “Little Rocket Man,” is a breathtaking gamble. No sitting U.S. president has ever met a North Korean leader, and Trump himself has repeatedly vowed he would not commit the error of his predecessors by being drawn into a protracted negotiation with the North, in which the United States makes concessions but allows North Korea to keep elements of its nuclear program.
Meeting Kim now, rather than at the end of a negotiation when the United States would presumably have extracted concessions from North Korea, is an enormous gesture by the president.
But Trump and Kim share a penchant for bold, dramatic moves, and their personal participation in a negotiation could take it in unexpected directions.
Chung’s announcement came at the end of another day of high drama at the White House, in which the president defied his own party by announcing sweeping tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and sought to ignore a mushrooming scandal over a pornographic film actress who claims to have had an affair with him.
White House officials had expected to deliberate for several days over how to respond to North Korea’s proposal for direct talks between the countries, which South Korean officials had conveyed by telephone this week.
But Kim’s offer of a leader-to-leader meeting radically accelerated the administration’s plans.
Trump himself teased the news, popping into the White House briefing room shortly after 5 p.m. to tell reporters gathered there that South Korea would make a major announcement at 7 p.m.
This week, Chung, President Moon Jae-in’s national security adviser, and his director of the National Intelligence Service, Suh Hoon, had made a two-day trip to North Korea, where they became the first South Korean officials to meet Kim.
Kim made promises to the South Korean envoys that Seoul hoped would meet the conditions set by the United States for starting a dialogue with the North.
Trump has said he could start talks with North Korea “only under the right conditions.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly said it would start talks with the North only when it first agreed to discuss denuclearization.
U.S. officials have also demanded that North Korea take some actions to show its sincerity.
Embarking on a high-level negotiation will pose a stiff challenge to the administration, which has built its North Korea policy around imposing crippling economic sanctions, backed by the threat of military action. People briefed by the administration said it had done little planning for how a negotiation with the North would unfold.
The State Department’s chief North Korea negotiator, Joseph Yun, recently announced his departure from the Foreign Service. The White House also scotched a plan to nominate another experienced negotiator, Victor Cha, as ambassador to Seoul.
Since taking power in May 2017, Moon, the South Korean leader, has repeatedly called for a dialogue with North Korea, even as Trump has escalated pressure on the North with increasingly harsh sanctions, more vigorous military maneuvers and a string of hostile tweets.
Kim rattled the region in 2017 with a series of nuclear and long-range missile tests.
Then he suddenly responded to Moon’s overtures for dialogue, in which he proposed talks with South Korea, saying he was willing to send athletes to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
North Korea sent hundreds of athletes, cheerleaders and singers to the games in February.
The two Koreas have also exchanged highlevel envoys in recent weeks, including Kim’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, who met Moon in Seoul in February.
Analysts expressed skepticism about Trump’s decision to meet Kim, saying there was no indication that North Korea had given up its determination to be a nuclear weapons state.
“There is every reason to believe that North Korea is attempting to blunt sanctions and secure de facto legitimacy for its nuclear weapons program with this gesture,” said Michael Green, a former Asia adviser to President George W. Bush, speaking by telephone from Tokyo, where he was visiting.
“There is no indication that North Korea is prepared to give up nuclear weapons,” he added, “and there are multiple risks for the president ranging from the alarm this will cause in Japan, where they are very worried, to the danger that the meeting ends up with a reduction of sanctions and a reduction of military exercises in exchange for an illusory pledge that North Korea will violate just as they’ve violated every agreement for 25 years.”
Evan Medeiros, an Asia adviser to President Barack Obama, said that any direct talks elevate Kim and legitimizes him. “We got nothing for it.
“And Kim will never give up his nukes,” Medeiros said. “Kim played Moon and is now playing Trump.”
Earlier, administration officials had spoken in scathing terms about North Korea’s offer of direct talks.
They noted that North Korea said nothing about halting the production of nuclear bombs or missiles during negotiations — which meant the North could build its arsenal while stringing out the talks.
It was clear the only thing that changed was Kim’s invitation to meet Trump himself. The president’s deal-making skills, one of his aides said Thursday, could produce a different outcome than previous rounds of diplomacy, which have always ended in failure and disappointment.
The highest-level U.S. official to meet with North Koreans was Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who visited Pyongyang in 2000, near the end of the Clinton administration.
Albright had planned to arrange a visit by President Bill Clinton.
But it fell apart when Kim Jong Il, the father of the current leader, would not agree to a missile deal in advance; he wanted to negotiate it face-to-face with the president. Clinton decided not to take the risk, skipped the trip, and used his last weeks in office to make a race for Middle East peace instead.