WASHINGTON -- The Senate's top Democrats insisted in a letter to President Donald Trump on Monday that any deal with North Korea must completely dismantle Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic missile programs permanently -- and that the White House must notify Congress of its plans before negotiations begin.
The minority leader and several ranking members issued a list of conditions in anticipation of the June 12 summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. They pressed the president to maintain a tough and unsparing stance both with North Korea and its ally China to ensure that the talks achieve the goal of a "full, complete and verifiable denuclearization of North Korea" -- and nothing less.
"Any deal that explicitly or implicitly gives North Korea sanctions relief for anything other than the verifiable performance of its obligations to dismantle its nuclear and missile arsenal is a bad deal," the Democratic senators wrote.
Congressional Democrats have given their cautious blessing to the talks, while at the same time expressing concerns that Trump may be too keen on making a deal with North Korea to ensure that it actually achieves the results that the United States wants.
"We want to make sure the president's desire for a deal with North Korea doesn't saddle the United States, [South] Korea and Japan with a bad deal," Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Monday. "The president needs to be willing to walk away from the table if there isn't a deal to be had."
Among the demands Democrats made in the letter are that any agreement continue North Korea's "current ballistic missile tests suspension, including any space launch"; include the full "dismantlement of ballistic missiles and a prohibition on all ballistic missile development"; and guarantee "that no ballistic missiles and associated technology are proliferated or exported."
They also insist in the letter that North Korea commit to "robust compliance" that includes "'anywhere, anytime' inspections" of both declared and undeclared "suspicious sites." Any deal should include "snapback sanctions" as well, to ensure that the penalties on North Korea are automatic if violations occur.
"Getting a deal with North Korea is actually the easy part," Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on Monday, noting how North Korea in the past has signed memorandums with the U.S. that then fell apart.
"Getting a good agreement that works and is sustainable ... is the hard part," he said.
Democrats noted Monday that the stakes of the potential talks with North Korea were far higher than those with Iran, which Schumer said "did not have nuclear weapons or a functional [intercontinental ballistic missile]" when it reached a deal with world powers to scale back its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
But "North Korea has both," Schumer said.
Schumer also warned on Monday that Democrats would be watching the progress of negotiations to ensure their principles are met, adding that "if we think that the president is veering off course, we would not hesitate to move" to increase mandatory sanctions against North Korea.
Schumer suggested that Republicans would join Democrats in any effort to restrain the president, if it appears he is moving too swiftly toward a bad deal.
Because Congress has already passed certain mandatory sanctions against North Korea, lawmakers would likely have to take some action to waive them before the U.S. could participate in any deal in which North Korea committed to fully denuclearize in exchange for relief. Menendez stressed that Congress would only take such steps if North Korea were clearly "in the midst of compliance" with a strict, acceptable deal.
SUMMIT COSTS
The White House said Monday that Trump's meeting with Kim is set for 9 a.m. June 12 in Singapore, which is 8 p.m. June 11 in the U.S.' Central time zone.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said planning continues for the summit and that negotiators from the U.S. and North Korea are trying to lay the groundwork during meetings at the Demilitarized Zone, between North and South Korea.
Speculation over how North Korea will handle the cost of the meeting has taken off after a Washington Post report cited two anonymous U.S. officials suggesting the Trump administration has been "seeking a discreet way" to help pay Kim's hotel bill.
The report suggested that host nation Singapore might take care of it.
[NUCLEAR NORTH KOREA: Maps, data on country’s nuclear program]
North Korea's government, which is no stranger to hosting lavish events like military parades and party congresses of its own, has funds to cover important meetings for Kim. But as history has shown, summits with the Kim family don't come cheap.
Seoul reportedly spent about $5 million to cover the costs of President Moon Jae-in's first summit with Kim in April -- a daylong affair that was held in publicly owned buildings on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone.
And nearly 20 years ago, former South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's administration secretly paid $500 million just to get Kim Jong Un's father to agree to the first-ever North-South Korea summit in 2000.
The South Korean president won that year's Nobel Peace Prize, before the payment was made public. One of his aides was convicted and went to prison.
U.S. State Department spokesman Heather Nauert has denied the U.S. will pay for North Korean expenses in Singapore, and she said Washington wasn't asking anyone else to, either.
In keeping with normal practice, Singapore, as the host nation, will have to pay for general security and various other expenses.
NON-NUCLEAR ISSUES
Even as the meeting approaches, Trump's focus on reaching a nuclear deal has left critics worried that he may give short shrift to human-rights abuses and regional security concerns.
Trump has largely kept his attention on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, recently stressing that it may take more than one meeting to achieve that goal.
Critics have begun to invoke the Iran nuclear deal as a cautionary tale. Republicans and some Democrats objected to the 2015 agreement for not doing more to halt that country's ballistic missile program and its support for Hezbollah and other extremist groups.
White House officials say the plight of the North Korean people, who live under one of the world's most repressive governments, is not a priority for the summit.
Trump said he did not raise the issue of human rights in a meeting Friday with one of Kim's top deputies, Kim Yong Chol. Trump did say he "probably" would bring up human rights when he meets with the North Korean leader -- "and maybe in great detail."
As for other concerns, Sanders last week wouldn't say whether Trump would bring up the North's extensive chemical and biological weapons programs. Kim Jong Un's half brother was fatally poisoned with VX nerve agent in a Malaysian airport last year, an attack the U.S. attributes to the North.
Meanwhile, U.S. allies in the region are privately pressing Trump's administration to maintain pressure on the North over its regional missile program out of concern that Trump could boost the security of the U.S. at the expense of its partners. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is meeting Trump at the White House on Thursday to advocate for his country's interests at the talks.
The delicate balancing of U.S. needs and alliances with the promotion of human rights abroad has long bedeviled American leaders. And Trump is not the first U.S. leader to concentrate on a nuclear issue at the expense of other matters.
But Trump has eschewed the path of his predecessors, who explicitly declared the promotion of human rights to be in the national interest.
The president's national security strategy, released in December, said little on the subject. And it was left to his vice president, Mike Pence, to elevate the issue during a February trip to South Korea.
Addressing the subject with the North is particularly difficult given that Kim's government is believed to view the raising of such issues as tantamount to advocating regime change.
While Trump has made gestures toward human-rights issues in North Korea, those efforts have largely been designed to increase pressure on the country's government. That was the case when Trump recognized a North Korean defector during his State of the Union address in January and hosted a group of North Korean escapees in the Oval Office.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said that while the summit presents the opportunity for a denuclearized peninsula, "I urge the Trump administration to also prioritize human rights and hold accountable the North Korean dictatorship for being one of the world's worst human-rights abusers."
Kim is on a Treasury Department blacklist for human-rights abuses and is likely to seek removal from the list as a concession.
White House officials have pushed back publicly against the notion that Trump has deprioritized international human rights. They point to the rollback of his predecessor's thawed relations with Cuba and Trump's comments about the devastation wrought by the Islamic State militant group and Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
MILITARY SHAKE-UP
Elsewhere, a South Korean news agency reported Monday that three of North Korea's top military officials have been replaced, marking an apparent shake-up in leader Kim's inner circle.
The officials who reportedly were dropped are from some of the highest reaches of the North's military structure, including Ri Myong Su, the chief of general staff for the Korean People's Army. Ri was thought to be a confidant of Kim's father, the late leader Kim Jong Il.
The others dismissed, according to Yonhap, were defense chief Pak Yong Sik and Kim Jong Gak, director of the political bureau of the North Korean army. Pak's ouster was previously reported by Japan's Asahi newspaper.
The report by the Yonhap news agency, citing an intelligence source, could not be independently verified.
It was unclear when the changes were carried out, but plans to replace Kim Jong Gak were reported in the North Korean media last month, Yonhap said.
North Korea made no immediate reference to any military changes, and it remains difficult to assess whether the shake-up could signal a significant change in North Korean policies.
Information for this article was contributed by Karoun Demirjian, Brian Murphy and Michelle Ye Hee Lee of The Washington Post; and by Zeke Miller, Catherine Lucey, Kevin Freking, Eric Talmadge and Matthew Pennington of The Associated Press.
A Section on 06/05/2018