The man who told former US president Donald Trump that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un wanted to denuclearize was yesterday named as South Korean minister of foreign affairs, hours before the inauguration of US President Joe Biden.
Former South Korean national security adviser Chung Eui-yong would be responsible for Seoul’s relations with the US after replacing Kang Kyung-wha, who was Seoul’s first female foreign minister when she was appointed in 2017.
Chung, 74, was instrumental in brokering the talks between Trump and Kim, which saw three headline-grabbing meetings between the two, but little substantive progress.
Photo: AFP / THE BLUE HOUSE
In March 2018, after a year in which the two leaders exchanged mutual insults, Chung visited Washington to brief Trump that Kim — who he had met earlier in Pyongyang — wanted to talk and was “committed to denuclearization.”
An ecstatic Trump immediately accepted the request for a summit and Chung was deputized to make the announcement in an unorthodox nighttime briefing on the White House lawn.
The two leaders met in a blaze of publicity in Singapore and signed a vaguely-worded statement on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, but a second summit in Hanoi collapsed over sanctions relief and what the North would be willing to give up in return.
The process has been stalled ever since, while the North has showed off several new missiles at military parades in October last year and this month, when Kim pledged to strengthen its nuclear arsenal.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in has long championed engagement with the North, and his office said in a statement that Chung had been “involved in every issue in the US-South Korea relationship,” and was the “best expert in the field of diplomacy and national security.”
Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for US secretary of state, in his confirmation hearing on Tuesday told the US Senate that the Biden administration would “review the entire approach and policy toward North Korea because this is a hard problem that has plagued administration after administration, and it’s a problem that has not gotten better. In fact, it’s gotten worse.”
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