[The reversal came after months in which Mr. Kim presented himself as a statesman, halting missile tests and freeing imprisoned Americans. Now, the North has reverted to its earlier hard-line stance on keeping its nuclear weapons and to a playbook that includes sudden shifts in tactics when negotiating with other nations.]
By Mark Landler
 |
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North Korea’s threat to
cancel a coming summit meeting between its leader,
Kim Jong-un, and
President Trump was brushed aside by the White House.
CreditAhn
Young-Joon/Associated Press
|
WASHINGTON
— The White House on
Wednesday brushed aside threats by North Korea to cancel a summit meeting
between President Trump and its leader, Kim Jong-un, but the harsh words
underscored the chasm that will separate the two leaders next month in Singapore
over how to deal with North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.
Mr. Trump struck a noncommittal tone about
the status of the meeting — “We’ll have to see,” he told reporters — but said
he still planned to demand that the North surrender its entire nuclear program.
A top North Korean official said Mr. Kim would not tolerate attempts to “drive
us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment.”
While administration officials and outside
experts said they believed the meeting would go off as planned, the clashing
messages brought a diplomatic high-wire act temporarily back to earth,
replacing the talk of history-making handshakes and Nobel Peace Prizes with the
sober recognition that North Korea views disarmament very differently than the
United States does.
The reversal came after months in which Mr.
Kim presented himself as a statesman, halting missile tests and freeing
imprisoned Americans. Now, the North has reverted to its earlier hard-line
stance on keeping its nuclear weapons and to a playbook that includes sudden
shifts in tactics when negotiating with other nations.
North Korea’s warning came as Mr. Trump faced
pressure to settle an escalating trade dispute with the North’s principal
economic patron, China. Mr. Kim has made two trips to China to seek its support
since inviting Mr. Trump to meet. Some administration officials said they
believed that China was exploiting its leverage over North Korea to pressure
Mr. Trump into a deal on trade.
American officials also said the North appeared
to be exploiting the differences between the hawkish views of the national
security adviser, John R. Bolton, and the more moderate tone of Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo, who has met twice with Mr. Kim in Pyongyang to arrange the
summit meeting.
Mr. Bolton has said the precedent for the
North Korea negotiations should be Libya, which agreed in 2003 to box up its
entire nuclear program and ship it out of the country without conditions. North
Korea, he said, should expect to receive no benefits, including the lifting of
sanctions, until it has done the same.
Mr. Pompeo has reiterated that the North
would have to agree to “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization,”
the technical shorthand used by the administration to describe its bargaining
position with Pyongyang. But he has promised that American investment that
would flow into North Korea if it agreed to those steps.
The president himself has toggled between
hard and soft tones. But on Wednesday, he posted no tweets and offered only a
tight-lipped response to North Korea’s warning, which was unusual both because
it was signed by the North’s first vice foreign minister, Kim Kye-gwan, and
because it took direct aim at Mr. Bolton. “We do not hide our feelings of
repugnance towards him,” Mr. Kim said.
The press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders,
was hardly more forthcoming.
“If they want to meet, we’ll be ready,” she
told reporters on Wednesday, “and if they don’t, that’s O.K., too.” She said
the White House “fully expected” North Korea to take this tack — an assertion
belied by the scrambling of officials when the first reports came in from
Pyongyang on Tuesday evening.
Other officials, however, insisted that they
were taking North Korea’s warnings in stride, noting that Mr. Kim, not Mr.
Trump, had sought the meeting. They said they expected the North to maneuver
for tactical advantage until the two leaders met on June 12.
People close to the White House said the
scattershot nature of the messages on North Korea reflected the newness of the
president’s national security team, but also the fact that Mr. Trump was
distracted by the swirl of legal issues around him, from the Russia
investigation to the payments made by his personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, to
a pornographic film actress.
Some suggested that Mr. Trump needed to rein
in Mr. Bolton — a point the North Korean official, Mr. Kim, appeared to be
making in his statement. He rejected Mr. Bolton’s reference to Libya as a
template for North Korea, saying that the “world knows too well that our
country is neither Libya nor Iraq, which have met miserable fates.”
If Pyongyang’s statements caught Washington
and Seoul off guard, they reflected a well-established North Korean position:
that it is only willing to negotiate with the United States as a fellow nuclear
power.
By referring to itself as a “nuclear weapon
state,” North Korea was not only distinguishing itself from Libya or Iraq, it
was also potentially signaling that the North is seeking an arms control
agreement, not disarmament. Under such an arrangement, analysts said, North
Korea would be treated like the Soviet Union and later Russia, which were asked
to limit, rather than eliminate, their arsenals.
While the daylight between Mr. Bolton and Mr.
Pompeo gives the North Koreans the opportunity to drive a wedge between members
of the president’s team, officials said that was a more manageable problem than
when Mr. Trump publicly undercut Mr. Pompeo’s predecessor as secretary of
state, Rex W. Tillerson, over how to deal with North Korea.
Beyond that, administration officials
expressed few qualms about the White House’s strategy. They noted that the
United States had not made any concessions to Mr. Kim, aside from the meeting
itself. Mr. Kim has agreed to stop nuclear and missile tests and to blow up an
underground nuclear site in the presence of foreign journalists.
Analysts and former officials agreed that North
Korea’s change of heart was both inevitable and useful as a clarifying moment.
“This indicates that we’re getting into a
serious negotiation,” said Evan S. Medeiros, an Asia adviser to President
Barack Obama. “The Trump administration has this very maximalist model, and
North Korea is at the other end of the spectrum. They’re putting the U.S. on
notice that what you think is going to happen is not going to happen.”
North Korea, other analysts said, had begun
to fear looking weak by taking unilateral steps, like its moratorium on missile
tests. The United States, rather than offering concessions of its own, has
vowed to keep up maximum pressure on the North if it fails to denuclearize
swiftly.
“The last thing Kim Jong-un can afford is to
look like he is surrendering his nuclear weapons,” said Koh Yu-hwan, a
professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul.
North Korea’s coordination with China has
become an important factor in strengthening its bargaining position. When Mr.
Kim met recently with President Xi Jinping in Beijing and the coastal city of
Dalian, he sought support for his country’s longstanding demand that Washington
and its allies take “synchronized” steps to satisfy the North’s security needs
in return for any “phased” moves toward denuclearization.
North Korea turned to China because, as the
North’s biggest economic benefactor, it can provide the best economic and
political cover as Mr. Kim confronts Mr. Trump over his demands. China, in
turn, may use the upcoming negotiations to gain an edge on Mr. Trump on trade.
A top Chinese economic official, Liu He, is meeting in Washington with American
officials this week.
Victor D. Cha, who negotiated with North
Korea during the George W. Bush administration, said its tough words were “a
splash of cold water on all of those who thought this was going to be easier
and different this time.” He predicted there would be several more bumps before
June 12.
“Welcome to the world of negotiating with the
obstreperous North Koreans,” Mr. Cha said.
Choe Sang-Hun contributed reporting from
Seoul, South Korea; Jane Perlez from Beijing; and David E. Sanger from Seattle.
