Leaders of Koreas meet again to discuss Trump-Kim summit

Talks come after a whirlwind 24 hours that saw the U.S. President cancel his highly anticipated meeting with Kim Jong-un before saying it’s potentially back on.

May 26, 2018 05:03 pm | Updated 06:18 pm IST

 Activists march toward the Dorasan Peace Park near Panmunjom in the Demilitarised Zone during the 2018 DMZ Women Peace Walk in Paju, South Korea on May 26, 2018.

Activists march toward the Dorasan Peace Park near Panmunjom in the Demilitarised Zone during the 2018 DMZ Women Peace Walk in Paju, South Korea on May 26, 2018.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in met for the second time in a month on May 26 to discuss carrying out the peace commitments they reached in their first summit and Mr. Kim’s potential meeting with United States President Donald Trump, Mr. Moon’s office said.

South Korean presidential spokesman Yoon Young-chan said Mr. Moon will reveal on May 27 the outcome of his surprise meeting with Mr. Kim. The presidential Blue House did not immediately provide more details.

The meeting at a border truce village came hours after South Korea expressed relief over revived talks for a summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim following a whirlwind 24 hours that saw Mr. Trump cancel the highly anticipated meeting before saying it’s potentially back on. Mr. Trump later tweeted that the summit, if it does happen, will likely take place on June 12 in Singapore as originally planned.

In their first summit in April, Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon announced vague aspirations for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula and permanent peace, which Seoul has tried to sell as a meaningful breakthrough to set up the summit with Mr. Trump.

Cancellation of meeting

But relations between the rival Koreas chilled in recent weeks, with North Korea canceling a high-level meeting with Seoul over South Korea’s participation in regular military exercises with the U.S. and insisting that it will not return to talks unless its grievances are resolved.

South Korea, which brokered the talks between Washington and Pyongyang, was caught off guard by Mr. Trump’s abrupt cancellation of the summit in which he cited hostility in recent North Korean comments. Mr. Moon said Mr. Trump’s decision left him “perplexed” and was “very regrettable”. He urged Washington and Pyongyang to resolve their differences through “more direct and closer dialogue between their leaders”.

Mr. Trump’s back-and-forth over his summit plans with Mr. Kim has exposed the fragility of Seoul as an intermediary. It fanned fears in South Korea that the country may lose its voice between a rival intent on driving a wedge between Washington and Seoul and an American President who thinks less of the traditional alliance with Seoul than his predecessors.

Mr. Trump’s decision to pull out of the summit with Mr. Kim came just days after he hosted Mr. Moon in a White House meeting where he openly cast doubts on the Singapore meeting but offered no support for continued inter-Korean progress, essentially ignoring the North’s recent attempts to coerce the South.

Pence called a “political dummy”

In his letter to Mr. Kim, Mr. Trump objected specifically to a statement from senior North Korean diplomat Choe Son Hui. She referred to Vice-President Mike Pence as a “political dummy” for his earlier comments on North Korea and said it was up to the Americans whether they would “meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown”.

North Korea issued an unusually restrained and diplomatic response to Mr. Trump, saying it’s still willing to sit for talks with the United States “at any time, (in) any format”.

“The first meeting would not solve all, but solving even one at a time in a phased way would make the relations get better rather than making them get worse,” North Korean Vice-Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan said in a statement carried by Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency, which mainly targets external audience.

Notably, the statement did not appear in the May 26 edition of Rodong Sinmun , the official mouthpiece of the North’s ruling party that’s widely read by North Koreans.

The newspaper instead focused on Kim Jong-un’s visit to the coastal town of Wonsan to inspect the construction of a beachfront tourist complex. Mr. Kim ordered the complex to be finished by April 15, 2019 to mark the birthday of his late grandfather and North Korea founder Kim Il-sung. Mr. Kim Jong-un’s comments published by the newspaper did not include any mention of his potential meeting with Mr. Trump.

Kim eager for sanctions relief

Analysts say Mr. Kim’s diplomatic outreach in recent months after a flurry of nuclear and missile tests in 2017 indicates he is eager for sanctions relief to build his economy and the international legitimacy the summit with Mr. Trump would provide. But there’s also scepticism whether Mr. Kim will ever agree to fully relinquish his nuclear arsenal, which he likely sees as his only guarantee of survival.

Comments in North Korea’s state media indicate Kim sees any meeting with Mr. Trump as an arms control negotiation between nuclear states, rather than a process to surrender his nukes. The North has said it will refuse to participate in talks where it would be unilaterally pressured to give up its nukes.

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