President Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un next month has experts hoping the president avoids Singapore redux and produces concrete steps to move closer to a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.
“It’s possible if the North Korean government abandons every demand that it’s made for the last 25 years and completely reverses its position on denuclearization and its ambitions for unconditional control of the Korean Peninsula,” Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on international security in the Korean Peninsula and Asia, said of whether tangible steps can be agreed upon. “But otherwise, it’ll be a little tough.”
The White House announced the second summit last month, and the news was well-received by South Korea’s Blue House. A spokesman said that South Korea expects the summit “to be a turning point for building up permanent peace on the Korean Peninsula.”
But in the U.S., observers are tempering expectations, particularly given that the last meeting between Trump and Kim yielded no concrete agreement. Since then, experts have been doubtful clear progress has been made.
“The whole summit can get crushed by the weight of everybody’s expectations,” Harry Kazianis, director of Korean Studies at the Center for the National Interest, told the Washington Examiner. “Everybody wants the magic bullet. Everybody wants the perfect solution. I think we have to realize that’s just not going to happen right away. But I do think there is a path forward.”
Trump first met with Kim in Singapore in June, marking the first time a sitting U.S. president has met with a North Korean leader. Following the summit, the White House released a joint agreement with Kim consisting of four points, including that Pyongyang would “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
The summit, however, was largely deemed by observers to be a victory for Kim, who extracted concessions from the U.S.
Since then, Trump has continued to project optimism about denuclearization, even as talks between the U.S. and Pyongyang have stalled, and the Pentagon, in its Missile Defense Review, referred to North Korea an “extraordinary threat.”
“We’ve made a lot of progress that has not been reported by the media, but we have made a lot of progress as far as denuclearization is concerned,” the president told reporters last month. “And we’re talking about a lot of different things.”
In looking ahead to next month’s summit, Kazianis backed a deal in which North Korea closes its Yongbyon nuclear complex in exchange for either a peace declaration ending the Korean War or sanctions relief from the U.S.
“That would be a win for everybody because, if Donald Trump can come back to Washington and say, ‘You know what, I’m the president that ended the Korean War,’ that’s a legacy builder for him, and it also allows him to change the narrative,” Kazianis said. “For Kim, it would be even bigger, because he could be the Korean leader to say, ‘We can trust the United States now. We’re at peace. There’s no more war.’ For him to go home to his domestic elite and say that, that would be pretty big.”
Kazianis also suggested the U.S. take a “baby steps approach” rather than working toward a grand bargain.
“The biggest thing we have to do is, we have to realize that denuclearization is going to come at the end of the process,” he said. “We put denuclearization at the beginning.”
“They’ve spent decades trying to build nuclear weapons and long-range missiles,” Kazianis said of North Korea. “They’re not going to give them up very easily. It’s going to take a lot of time, and it’s going to be at the very end of the process where we get full denuclearization.”
Eberstadt said the U.S. should press forward with action that requires no buy-in from North Korea and instead focus on “more threat reduction and less parlaying around the negotiating table.”
“Threat reduction is something we can accomplish through our own military, economic, diplomatic, and other policies in conjunction with our allies and with other countries when other countries are interested in cooperating in this objective,” he said.
The U.S., Eberstadt continued, can’t “achieve our national security objectives with North Korea by sitting around a table with North Korean officials and signing papers.”
