SEOUL, South Korea -- A senior American negotiator arrived in North Korea on Wednesday to sort out details for a nuclear summit meeting in Vietnam between President Donald Trump and the North's leader, Kim Jong Un, with only three weeks to go before the talks take place.
Stephen Biegun, the Trump administration's special representative for North Korea, arrived in Pyongyang, the North's capital, around the time that Trump announced in his State of the Union address that he and Kim would meet for a second time on Feb. 27-28 in Vietnam. Beigun's trip had been announced in advance.
When Kim and Trump first met in Singapore in June, they agreed to work toward the "complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" and to build "new" relations between their countries. But since then, talks have stalled over how to carry out that vaguely worded agreement.
Trump now wants "significant and verifiable progress on denuclearization, actions that are bold and real," Biegun said last week in a speech at Stanford University. But American intelligence agencies recently cautioned that the North was "unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capability."
During his Pyongyang visit, Biegun plans to pursue "concrete plans to advance all of the elements of the Singapore joint statement," he said last week. He said the working-level talks in Pyongyang would be aimed at finding concessions that each side could accept, as well as "a road map of negotiations and declarations going forward, and a shared understanding of the desired outcomes of our joint efforts."
Biegun's trip to negotiate such important unresolved issues, just weeks before the talks, reflects the top-down diplomacy that Trump and Kim appear to prefer. The American envoy had his first meeting with Kim Hyok-chol, his newly appointed North Korean counterpart, only three weeks ago in Washington.
President Moon Jae-in of South Korea has said that Trump's apparent strong desire to become the U.S. leader who ends the North Korean nuclear threat, along with Kim Jong Un's announcement that reviving the North's economy is his top priority, have increased the chances for a breakthrough in the decades-old nuclear dispute.
"We hope that both leaders will take more detailed and concrete steps in Vietnam," Moon's spokesman, Kim Eui-kyeom, said Wednesday, urging both sides to learn from the American experience in Vietnam.
In Vietnam, a one-party Communist state where government offices were closed Wednesday for the Lunar New Year holiday, Trump's announcement was noted in the state-controlled news media. Le Thi Thu Hang, a spokesman for the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry, said in a statement that the country "strongly supports dialogues held with a view to maintaining peace, security and stability in the Korean Peninsula."
Biegun said last week that Trump's bold approach had allowed more room for maneuver than any of the envoy's predecessors had. His North Korean counterpart is from the State Affairs Commission, a powerful agency that reports directly to Kim Jong Un.
"It's a positive sign that the working-level teams of both sides are headed by figures who are considered flexible and deeply trusted by their leaders," said Cheong Seong-chang, an analyst at the Sejong Institute in South Korea.
But analysts have long warned that Kim could try to give up just enough of his nuclear weapons program to create the illusion of progress, allowing Trump to claim victory while leaving unchanged the North's long-term goal of being recognized as a de facto nuclear weapons state.
"This is like the train racing ahead without even knowing where its final destination is," said Cheon Seong-whun, an analyst at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. "If they produce another half-cooked agreement in the second summit and fail to specify what their final goal is, it would only help make North Korea's nuclear arsenal a fait accompli."
A Section on 02/07/2019