GROUP OF 20
[American negotiators
would seek to expand on Mr. Kim’s offer in Hanoi in February to give up the
country’s main nuclear-fuel production site, at Yongbyon, in return for the
most onerous sanctions against the country being lifted. Mr. Trump, under
pressure from his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and his national security
adviser, John R. Bolton, rejected that proposal, because so much of the North’s
capability now lies outside the vast Yongbyon complex.]
By
Michael Crowley and David E. Sanger
 |
|
President
Trump and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, on the North Korean side of the
Demilitarized Zone on Sunday.
Credit Erin Schaff/The New York Times
|
SEOUL,
South Korea — From a
seemingly fanciful tweet to a historic step into North Korean territory,
President Trump’s largely improvised third meeting on Sunday with Kim Jong-un,
the North Korean leader, was a masterpiece of drama, the kind of made-for-TV
spectacle that Mr. Trump treasures.
But for weeks before the meeting, which
started as a Twitter offer by the president for Mr. Kim to drop by at the
Demilitarized Zone and “say hello,” a real idea has been taking shape inside
the Trump administration that officials hope might create a foundation for a
new round of negotiations.
The concept would amount to a nuclear freeze,
one that essentially enshrines the status quo, and tacitly accepts the North as
a nuclear power, something administration officials have often said they would
never stand for.
It falls far short of Mr. Trump’s initial vow
30 months ago to solve the North Korea nuclear problem, but it might provide
him with a retort to campaign-season critics who say the North Korean dictator
has been playing the American president brilliantly by giving him the visuals
he craves while holding back on real concessions.
While the approach could stop that arsenal
from growing, it would not, at least in the near future, dismantle any existing
weapons, variously estimated at 20 to 60. Nor would it limit the North’s
missile capability.
The administration still insists in public
and in private that its goals remain full denuclearization. But recognizing
that its maximalist demand for the near-term surrender of Mr. Kim’s cherished
nuclear program is going nowhere, it is weighing a new approach that would
begin with a significant — but limited — first step.
American negotiators would seek to expand on
Mr. Kim’s offer in Hanoi in February to give up the country’s main nuclear-fuel
production site, at Yongbyon, in return for the most onerous sanctions against
the country being lifted. Mr. Trump, under pressure from his secretary of
state, Mike Pompeo, and his national security adviser, John R. Bolton, rejected
that proposal, because so much of the North’s capability now lies outside the
vast Yongbyon complex.
The idea now is to get Mr. Kim’s new
negotiating team to agree to expand the definition of the Yongbyon site well
beyond its physical boundaries. If successful — and there are many obstacles,
including the North accepting intrusive, perhaps invasive inspections — it
would effectively amount to a nuclear freeze that keeps North Korea from making
new nuclear material.
But a senior United States official involved
in North Korean policy said there was no way to know if North Korea would agree
to this. In the past, he said, its negotiators have insisted that only Mr. Kim
himself could define what dismantling Yongbyon meant.
To make any deal work, the North would have
to agree to include many facilities around the country, among them a covert
site called Kangson, which is outside Yongbyon and is where American and South
Korean intelligence agencies believe the country is still producing uranium
fuel.
A president embarking on a re-election
campaign — and who complained repeatedly on Sunday that he receives no credit
from the media for de-escalating tensions with North Korea and for the freeze
on underground nuclear tests and test-launches of intercontinental ballistic
missiles — would most likely cast this as a victory, as another restraint on
Mr. Kim. It would help Mr. Trump argue that he is making progress, albeit
slowly, on one of the world’s most intractable crises.
And it would be progress after three
face-to-face meetings — first in Singapore a little more than a year ago, then
in Hanoi, then in an hourlong discussion at the DMZ on Sunday — that have
produced warm exchanges but no shared definitions of what it meant to
denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. A year after that first meeting, the North
has yet to turn over an inventory of what it possesses, claiming that would
give the United States a map of military targets.
On Sunday evening, the State Department’s
envoy to North Korea, Stephen E. Biegun, said that this account of the ideas
being generated in the administration was “pure speculation” and that his team
was “not preparing any new proposal currently.”
“What is accurate is not new, and what is new
is not accurate,” he said.
Presumably, Mr. Trump’s freeze would have to
be a permanent one, or he will have gotten less from Mr. Kim than President
Barack Obama got from Iran in a deal Mr. Trump dismissed as “disastrous.” And
even a successful freeze would constitute a major retreat from the goal of the
“rapid denuclearization of North Korea, to be completed by January 2021,” as
Mr. Pompeo put it last fall.
But it does have the benefit of being vastly
more achievable.
More than two years ago, on his first trip to
Seoul, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson rejected a similar idea. He said it
would “leave North Korea with significant capabilities that would represent a
true threat, not just to the region, but to American forces, as well.”
But Mr. Trump, who prizes his personal
relationship with Mr. Kim, would most likely argue that a freeze was
groundbreaking. (He has also described Mr. Tillerson, who he dismissed early in
2018, as “dumb as a rock” so he would most likely not be limited by his past
declarations.)
In fact, this approach has been attempted
before: It bears strong similarities to the nuclear freeze President Bill
Clinton negotiated with Mr. Kim’s father in 1994. But that was a dozen years
before the North’s first nuclear test, and before it possessed either nuclear
weapons or the capability to deliver them.
Mr. Clinton’s deal held for five or six
years, until it became obvious the North was cheating by seeking a new approach
to the bomb — uranium enrichment. The North broke out of it in 2003. George W.
Bush negotiated a partial freeze at Yongbyon in 2007; it too fell apart.
The approach raises the larger question of
whether Mr. Trump really cares about striking a tough denuclearization deal, or
whether, as many critics charge, he is mainly interested in the illusion of
progress to present himself to voters as a peacemaker.
“The president constantly takes credit for
the fact that the prospect of war has receded,” said Richard Haass, the
president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who was involved in the Bush
administration’s confrontations with the North. “But it went up not because
North Korea was doing anything differently, but because the administration was
threatening war. And it went down not because the threat had lessened, but
because the administration seemed content with the chimera of
denuclearization.”
Mr. Trump’s more limited expectations may,
however, mesh perfectly with Mr. Kim’s plans. While Mr. Kim is eager to shed
all the economic sanctions on his country, some North Korea analysts believe he
would happily accept only partial sanctions relief along with lowered
expectations that he might actually surrender his arsenal.
“I do think Kim could offer just enough on
the negotiating table, such as the Yongbyon nuclear facility plus yet another
suspected nuclear facility, in order to secure an interim deal with Trump and
at least some sanctions relief,” said Sue Mi Terry, who served at the C.I.A.
and the National Security Council under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack
Obama.
Mr. Kim “may calculate that this is still not
a bad deal because it would allow the North to keep its nuclear and missile
arsenal — and it would give Trump an opportunity to claim he had achieved
something none of his predecessors had,” Ms. Terry said.
At the core of Mr. Trump’s argument is that
his friendship with Mr. Kim alone constitutes diplomatic success; on Sunday,
the president asserted that the “tremendous danger” from North Korea he inherited
when he took office has passed. “We’re a lot safer today,” Mr. Trump said
before a meeting with South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in.
Adam Mount, a senior fellow at the Federation
of American Scientists, said, “Several times he spoke as if friendship with Kim
Jong-un is an end in itself.”
Mr. Trump may once have warned of “fire and
fury” if Mr. Kim failed to surrender his weapons, but he “now embraces that
these meetings aren’t about getting to denuclearization but instead having a
good one-to-one relationship with Kim Jong-un,” said Van Jones, a former senior
country director for Korea at the Department of Defense during the Obama
administration
“That’s legitimation of a nuclear state,” Mr.
Jones said.
If so, the outline of the next year or so of
negotiations may be taking shape: A series of on-and-off negotiations that
creep forward, punctuated by feel-good presidential meetings like Sunday’s,
while the world grows use to an arsenal of North Korean weapons the way it grew
accustomed to Pakistan’s, or India’s or Israel’s.
“Despite all the reality show-like optics of
the Singapore and Hanoi summits and this meeting today, what substantive
progress have we made in denuclearization?” asked Yun Duk-min, a former
chancellor of the Korea National Diplomatic Academy who now teaches at Hankuk
University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. “Not a single nuclear warhead or
missile in North Korea has been eliminated. The North’s nuclear facilities are
still in operation.”
On Sunday, Mr. Trump was ushered into the
Demilitarized Zone by President Moon of South Korea — who then sat outside
while Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim met. It was a stunning bit of symbolism for those
who argue the South has been sidelined in these talks.
Despite the imagery, Mr. Moon’s government
sounded optimistic, at least officially.
“Through their meeting today, the South and
North Korean leaders and the American leader made history,” Yoon Do-han, Mr.
Moon’s chief presidential press secretary, said in a statement following the
border meeting.
Michael Crowley reported from Seoul, and
David E. Sanger from Washington. Choe Sang-hun contributed reporting from
Seoul.
