By Eli Stokols and Noah Bierman
Tribune Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump declared that the June 12 summit with North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore is on again.
“We’ll see where it leads but we’re going to meet June 12,” Trump said Friday afternoon after meeting for more than an hour with one of Kim’s top deputies.
“I think it’ll be a process,” Trump continued. “I never said it goes in one meeting. I said it’d be a process.”
In a tableau unimaginable just a few months ago, one of Kim Jong Un’s top deputies met with Trump for nearly two hours. Trump eagerly awaited a hand-delivered letter from the North Korean leader that could determine whether their proposed nuclear disarmament summit is on or off.
Kim Yong Chol, who had promised to hand over the sealed letter, was greeted by chief of staff John F. Kelly at the White House’s south driveway.
When they left for the Oval Office to meet privately with Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, television cameras broadcasting the event live remained fixed on a window near Trump’s office, though the action inside could not be seen.
Pompeo and Kim Yong Chol, a former spy chief who is one of North Korea’s most powerful figures, held talks Thursday morning in New York in an attempt to revive the proposed June 12 summit in Singapore.
The four-star general is under multiple U.S. sanctions, and he needed a State Department waiver to visit New York and Washington.
The diplomatic gesture, and the welcome he received in the Oval Office, are a sign of the White House’s eagerness for a breakthrough with the isolated nuclear-armed regime.
Just months ago, Trump and Kim Jong Un were trading crude insults — “Little Rocket Man” versus “mentally deranged U.S. dotard,” among others — and threatening to launch nuclear war with what Trump called “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
The White House meeting comes eight days after Trump wrote a terse letter to Kim Jong Un calling off the summit but leaving a window open for further talks.
Since then, the two governments have engaged in intense bouts of diplomacy in New York, Singapore and in the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas to see if the summit should go forward. Teams have scrambled to arrange security, logistics and an agenda for the two leaders.
Trump has been eager to put himself in the middle of the negotiations on a possible deal to restrict North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. On Thursday, when he first disclosed the North Korean delegation’s desire to bring him the letter, he said talks have gone “very well” and are “in good hands.”
“We’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. “It’s all a process. We’ll see. And hopefully we’ll have a meeting on the 12th. That’s going along very well, but I want it to be meaningful. It doesn’t mean it gets all done at one meeting; maybe you have to have a second or a third. And maybe we’ll have none.”
Friday’s anticipated visit by Kim Yong Chol is similar to a 2002 visit to Washington by Vice Marshal Jo Myong-rok, then North Korea’s second-most-powerful official. Jo met with President Bill Clinton and delivered a letter from North Korea’s leader at the time, Kim Jong Il.
That meeting, which occurred during an another era of optimism, included an invitation for Clinton to visit Pyongyang to seal a deal to restrict the country’s ballistic missile program. Neither the visit nor the missile deal came to fruition, and North Korea has since steadily expanded its missile and nuclear programs.
Robert L. Gallucci, who led the 1994 nuclear negotiations with North Korea for the Clinton administration, said he thought the fact that Friday’s meeting took place is further sign that the summit will happen and may even hold to the June 12 schedule. But he said Trump’s opening gambit — unconditional surrender of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal — was a nonstarter.
“That they do everything and we do nothing … sets an expectation that can’t be met,” Gallucci said.
“There will have to be concessions” for North Korea, he said, possibly including a “manifestation of normalcy” that goes beyond a peace treaty to replace the armistice that halted the Korean War in 1953.
Other concessions might involve changes or downgrading of the annual joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, Gallucci said the North Koreans, as far back as 1994, have not insisted on withdrawing U.S. troops from South Korea. That demand, instead, is far more important to China, who sees the American troops as a U.S. beachhead in the Asia-Pacific region, Gallucci said.
Jonathan Pollack, an Asia expert at the Brookings Institution, said the hurry to a summit could have negative consequences.
“One troubling possibility, in the rush to get across the finish line, is a bad agreement … that Trump talks up,” Pollack said. “I’m almost imagining a scenario looking ahead a couple of weeks: The television media saying this is the moon and the stars, (but) you wake up the next morning and look at the fine print and see it is not there.”
