South Korean President Moon Jae-in is due today to hold talks in the White House with US President Donald Trump amid growing uncertainty over Trump’s planned North Korean summit in Singapore on June 12.
Trump was reported by the New York Times to have been “surprised and angered” by a statement from a senior North Korean official last week that said the regime would never trade away its nuclear arsenal and would not settle for a “one-sided” outcome to Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Trump administration officials have repeatedly said they expect North Korea to accept complete verifiable, irreversible disarmament at the summit, and that the US will accept nothing less.
The North Koreans have stated their interest in “complete denuclearisation” of the Korean Peninsula, but they define it in different ways, including a phased mutual process, in which the US would draw down its military presence in the region, and eventually all nuclear powers would reduce their reliance on nuclear arsenals.
According to several accounts, the origins of the misunderstanding lay in the visit of Moon’s national security adviser, Chung Eui-yong, to Washington in early March after meeting Kim in Pyongyang.
Chung was briefing the then-US national security adviser H.R. McMaster on the outcome of the trip when Trump called them into the Oval Office to brief him directly.
In the weeks that followed, Trump claimed to have succeeded in dealing with the North Korean nuclear threat where his predecessors had failed.
Moon, keen to defuse tensions on the peninsula, said Trump should receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and the call for the award was taken up by crowds at Trump rallies.
However, the optimism in the run-up to the meeting was punctured on Wednesday last week, when former North Korean negotiator Kim Gye-gwan rejected “unilateral nuclear abandonment” and threatened withdrawal from the Singapore talks if US officials stuck to that negotiating position.
Moon is expected to use his visit to the White House to reassure Trump that the summit is a gamble worth taking.
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