[Mr. Moon has helped bring about a rare reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula, playing mediator between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump. The South Korean leader has urged Mr. Kim to commit to denuclearization, arguing that he cannot improve the lives of his long-suffering people as long as North Korea retains its nuclear weapons, which have prompted harsh international sanctions. He has also urged Mr. Trump to promise security assurances and economic incentives for North Korea to convince it that it can be safe without a nuclear deterrent.]
By Choe Sang-Hun
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A picture released by
North Korea’s state news agency on Friday showing Kim Jong-un
at a military commission
meeting. The North has become increasingly disagreeable
toward the South and the
United States in recent days.CreditKorean Central
News Agency, via Agence
France-Presse — Getty Images
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SEOUL,
South Korea — When the South
Korean president meets with President Trump in Washington next week, the two
will discuss security assurances and economic incentives for a denuclearizing
North Korea, following up on Mr. Trump’s reassuring words for the North’s young
leader, a presidential aide in Seoul said on Friday.
At the White House meeting on Tuesday,
President Moon Jae-in of South Korea hopes to advise Mr. Trump on the summit
meeting planned on June 12 with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in
Singapore. Mr. Moon, who had a dramatic meeting with Mr. Kim on the
inter-Korean border on April 27, helped arrange the Singapore meeting.
As those talks near, however, North Korea has
become increasingly disagreeable, threatening to cancel the event over fears
that it will not get the rewards it is seeking in exchange for dismantling the
nuclear arsenal the impoverished country has taken decades to build.
“The two heads of states will focus their
discussions on detailed plans to achieve the complete denuclearization of North
Korea and permanent settlement of peace on the Korean Peninsula,” Nam Gwan-pyo,
a senior presidential aide to Mr. Moon, said on Friday of the White House
meeting. “We expect them to discuss ways to guarantee a bright future for the
North in return for its complete denuclearization.”
Mr. Moon has helped bring about a rare
reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula, playing mediator between Mr. Kim and
Mr. Trump. The South Korean leader has urged Mr. Kim to commit to
denuclearization, arguing that he cannot improve the lives of his
long-suffering people as long as North Korea retains its nuclear weapons, which
have prompted harsh international sanctions. He has also urged Mr. Trump to
promise security assurances and economic incentives for North Korea to convince
it that it can be safe without a nuclear deterrent.
Mr. Moon’s approach faced challenges this
week, however. North Korea suspended talks with the South, blaming joint
military exercises the South held with the United States last week, which the
North said was a rehearsal for invasion. And on Friday, North Korea declined to
accept a list of eight South Korean reporters it had invited to watch the
closing of its nuclear test site next week.
North Korea has also said that Mr. Kim will
not be interested in meeting Mr. Trump if his hard-line aides, especially John
R. Bolton, the national security adviser, insisted on North Korea accepting a
quick and “unilateral nuclear abandonment,” as Libya did more than a decade ago
under American pressure.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump sought to calm North
Korea, promising that he would not treat North Korea and Mr. Kim the way the
West did Libya and its former leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. North Korea says
Colonel Gaddafi precipitated his downfall and death by agreeing to swap his
nascent nuclear program for economic integration with the West.
Mr. Trump promised Mr. Kim “protections that
would be very strong” in return for giving up its nuclear weapons.
“The Libyan model isn’t a model that we have
at all, when we’re thinking of North Korea,” Mr. Trump said. “If you look at
that model with Qaddafi, that was a total decimation. We went in there to beat
him.”
“Now that model would take place if we don’t
make a deal, most likely,” Mr. Trump warned. “But if we make a deal, I think
Kim Jong-un is going to be very, very happy.”
Mr. Trump said that if North Korea were to
denuclearize, the United States could help its “tremendously industrious”
people follow “a South Korean model.”
He appeared to be referring to American
military protection to the South, which allowed that country to recover from
the devastation of the 1950-53 Korean War and to become a global economic
powerhouse, while the North slid into famine and economic deprivation. Driven
by fears for its survival, the North has stepped up its nuclear weapons program
since the early 1990s.
Despite the North’s latest protest, American
and North Korean officials have continued to make arrangements for the
Singapore meeting, Mr. Trump said.
South Korean officials say they hope Mr. Kim
and Mr. Trump will meet halfway, agreeing on an early timetable to exchange
denuclearization for security guarantees from Washington. They suggest the
exchange can take place in a “phased” manner, as the North demands, and be
carried out quickly, as Washington wants — perhaps before the end of Mr.
Trump’s presidential term in early 2021.
Washington appeared to embrace another
suggestion that South Korean officials and analysts have been proposing for
weeks: that North Korea and the United States should agree on “early
trust-building measures” to give credibility to a denuclearization deal coming
from the Kim-Trump meeting. Such measures could include dismantling long-range
missile production facilities; allowing unfettered access to nuclear sites in
the North; creating liaison offices in Pyongyang, the North’s capital, and
Washington; and easing some sanctions, especially those that affect the lives
of ordinary North Koreans, according to South Korean analysts.
On Friday, Mr. Moon’s office strongly denied
a Japanese news report that his office had suggested to Mr. Bolton the idea of
shipping some of the North’s nuclear weapons outside the country, as an early
step toward denuclearization. .
This week, Susan A. Thornton, the acting
assistant secretary of state, said that in the weeks leading up to the
Singapore meeting, American and North Korean officials would negotiate what
could be “front-loaded” by the North and the United States in what would be a
long process toward denuclearization.
“It’s obvious that there will be multiple
steps to any denuclearization,” she said, adding that verifying the process
takes time. “The question is what could be front-loaded in a process that’s
inevitably going to go on for some time. Then what would be acceptable to the
North Korean side in return for that front-loading, whatever it is.”
Ms. Thornton added that the lifting of
sanctions was not the only thing on the table.
“What Kim Jong-un and other North Korean
leaders going back have always talked about is the need for some kind of
security assurances and other kinds of assurances, legitimacy, respect from the
international community,” she said. “He’s very young so he presumably wants to
be around for a long time and maybe wants to have some kind of different future
for his country.”