The Trump administration is growing in confidence that an upcoming summit with Kim Jong-un will achieve the aggressive denuclearization timeline Washington wants, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying the North Korean leader is “serious” about abandoning his nuclear program.
Those hopes got a boost over the weekend, according to officials in Seoul, when the North Korean leader said outright during a historic meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in that he is willing to give up his nuclear weapons totally if the U.S. commits to a formal end to the Korean War and pledges never to attack North Korea.
National Security Adviser John R. Bolton reacted coolly to the idea Sunday, but analysts said the purported offer, coupled with Mr. Kim’s public backing of a joint declaration with Mr. Moon that said “complete denuclearization” is now a “mutual goal,” is the firmest indication to date that the North Korean leader genuinely wants to negotiate with Mr. Trump.
The U.S. president and Mr. Moon agreed during a 75-minute phone call Saturday to work together toward bringing about the Trump-Kim summit as quickly as possible. U.S. sources said the list of possible locations for the event has narrowed to either Mongolia or Singapore.
Mr. Trump previously said he hoped to have the historic face-to-face meeting by late May or early June, but he gave no specifics on the timing. He tweeted after his call with Mr. Moon only that “things are going very well, time and location of meeting with North Korea is being set.”
Mr. Pompeo, who has been seen as a key player in the administration’s push toward the summit since it was revealed that he met Mr. Kim privately in Pyongyang in early April, expressed optimism during an interview over the weekend with ABC News. He said once Mr. Trump and the North Korean leader are “in a room together, they can set the course [and] chart the outcome” of denuclearization negotiations.
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But the secretary of state was also cautious about the fast-breaking developments in the months since Pyongyang detonated a massive underground nuclear bomb and a conducted a barrage of intercontinental ballistic missile tests.
At the time, Mr. Kim hurled threats at Washington and its allies amid intelligence reports that his regime had succeeded in developing a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on an ICBM that could reach the U.S. mainland.
Despite the momentum, Mr. Pompeo stressed that Mr. Trump’s objective of getting Mr. Kim to agree to “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization” — so-called CVID — has not changed and that the administration “has its eyes wide open” about Pyongyang’s decades of shrewdness at using negotiations as cover while building its nuclear program in violation of U.N. resolutions.
“We know the history, we know the risks,” Mr. Pompeo said. “We’re going to negotiate in a different way than has been done before.”
Analysts say the big test of whether a Trump-Kim summit can overcome the kind of breakdown that has scuttled the last major attempt at diplomacy — the six-party talks in 2009 between the U.S., the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia — will center on whether Mr. Trump can get Mr. Kim to commit to a fast timeline for CVID.
Mr. Trump is under pressure from allies, including Japan, to push hard for a deadline of as early as 2020. The Japanese have also called on the White House not to offer any sanctions relief to Pyongyang until CVID has been totally achieved.
Although it is not clear what Mr. Kim will agree to, the 36-year-old North Korean leader sent hopes soaring during his summit with Mr. Moon by vowing, according to South Korean officials, that he will shut down the North’s main nuclear test site in May and make the closure public, for international inspectors and journalists to observe.
However, the joint declaration delivered by Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon during the summit did not explicitly mention that move and said only broadly that the two men had “agreed to gradually realize arms reduction when their military tension is removed and trust is practically established.”
Several Republican lawmakers spent the weekend heaping praise on Mr. Trump’s effective use over the past year of military threats and U.S.-led international economic sanctions, arguing that it has successfully persuaded North Korea to enter into negotiations toward denuclearization.
Some influential Democrats on Capitol Hill have also offered guarded rhetorical applause. Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said Sunday on ABC, “I think it’s more than fair to say that the combination of the president’s unpredictability and indeed his bellicosity had something to do with the North Koreans deciding to come to the table,” although he quickly warned Mr. Trump not to get too cocky.
“Before the president takes too much credit or hangs out the ’Mission Accomplished’ banner, he needs to realize we may go into a confrontational phase and he may not want the full blame if things go south, so you have to be a little circumspect about that,” he said.
Mr. Bolton appeared Sunday on CBS to express caution toward Mr. Kim’s purported denuclearization offer.
“We’ve heard this before,” the national security adviser said when asked how the administration might respond to the offer. “The North Korean propaganda playbook is an infinitely rich resource.”
“What we want to see from them is evidence that it’s real and not just rhetoric,” said Mr. Bolton, who is widely seen as the most skeptical of Mr. Trump’s top advisers toward the prospect of successful diplomacy with Pyongyang.
Mr. Bolton separately told Fox News on Sunday that total abandonment by North Korea of all of its nuclear weapons, infrastructure and fuel, as well as all of its ballistic missiles, is “what denuclearization means.”
He compared the situation to Libya in 2003, when dictator Moammar Gadhafi agreed to abandon his nation’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for a temporary seat on the U.N. Security Council and other guarantees.
Mr. Bolton, who has argued that the administration should follow the “Libyan model” with North Korea, has drawn criticism from some South Korean analysts, who note how officials in Pyongyang have long cited Gadhafi’s death at the hands of U.S.-backed rebels during the 2011 Arab Spring as an example of why a smaller state should never surrender its nuclear arsenal.
Paik Hak-soon, a top North Korea analyst with the Sejong Institute think tank in South Korea, told The Washington Times recently that “we all know the Gadhafi case is something the North Koreans point to repeatedly to demonstrate that their behavior will not be decided by anybody, let alone by the United States, the way Gadhafi’s was.”
Mr. Paik, who spoke with The Times ahead of Friday’s Moon-Kim summit, also argued that Mr. Trump could damage the chance of quick success in talks with Mr. Kim if he follows through on his threats to pull the U.S. out the Obama-era Iran deal — something the president has said he may do in early May.
Doing so will make Mr. Kim far less likely to fully commit to a deal to abandon his nuclear program for fear that Washington might renege on such an agreement down the road, said Mr. Paik. “It will have a very negative influence on North Korea’s decision of whether to make any serious concessions during a summit with President Trump,” he said.
Mr. Pompeo, meanwhile, dismissed such concerns on Sunday. He told reporters traveling with him on a diplomatic tour of the Middle East that the Iran deal is inadequate and that the Trump administration is serious in its efforts to “try and fix it” through coordination with European allies who also signed the accord.
“I am confident that Kim Jong-un is looking for more than a piece of paper, right?” Mr. Pompeo said. “He’s not just staring at this North Korean deal and saying, ’Oh goodness, there was this Iran agreement between President Obama and the Iranians, and I’m going to rely on the fact that the Americans stayed in that to have confidence that the Americans will do the right thing if I give up my nuclear weapons.’”
• Valerie Richardson contributed to this article.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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