South Korean President Moon Jae-in urged President Trump and Kim Jong Un to quickly find a way to talk directly in hopes of avoiding a total meltdown in diplomacy or a military clash Thursday, hours after Mr. Trump canceled his planned summit with the North Korean leader amid hostile posturing from Pyongyang.
“Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the establishment of permanent peace are historic tasks that can neither be abandoned nor delayed,” Mr. Moon said at an emergency meeting with his top security officials in Seoul around midnight local time.
“I am very perplexed and it is very regrettable that the North Korea-U.S. summit will not be held on June 12 when it was scheduled to be held,” said Mr. Moon, according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.
The South Korean president, who has based his political fortunes on the pursuit of diplomacy with Pyongyang, was apparently blindsided by Mr. Trump’s decision to cancel the summit despite roughly two weeks of increasingly harsh rhetoric and threats from North Korean officials.
A top South Korean analyst and advisor to the South Korean Presidential Security Council told an audience in Washington Thursday that there could be “tremendous domestic costs” to Mr. Moon if the delicate diplomatic process of the past several months fully collapses.
Kim Heung-Kyu, who is also a visiting fellow at Georgetown University, said Mr. Moon will likely do everything in his power to prevent that from happening. “The South Korean government will continue to communicate with North Korea to persuade them to come back to the table,” Mr. Kim said at an event in Washington hosted by the Center for the National Interest.
The Moon government was already seen to be scrambling to keep the diplomacy going with Pyongyang after North Korea abruptly canceled a high-level meeting between North and South officials that had been slated for earlier this month.
The meeting was supposed to have been a follow-up to a break-through summit Mr. Moon and Mr. Kim held in late April, after which the two appeared together to announce the joint goals of pursuing denuclearization on the Korean peninsula and a permanent peace treaty to formally end the frozen war that has divided the peninsula since the early-1950s.
With the fate of those goals now hanging in the balance, analysts say the Moon government is unlikely to quickly give up hope and will try, quickly, convince North Korea’s leader of what he has to lose.
Mr. Kim, the South Korean analyst, said Thursday that the North Korea leader knows that he “needs an achievement to consolidate his power and achieve legitimacy.”
In the short term, he sees the possession of nuclear weapons as the key to his survival, but in the “long run he should achieve something like economic development and welfare, so [he] fully recognizes the problem he faces,” said Mr. Kim. “We can cultivate that kind of opportunity to persuade him.”
On a separate front, the South Korean analyst said Mr. Moon will likely stand with the Trump administration if moves to significantly ramp up economic sanctions against Pyongyang and will continue to prepare itself militarily against North Korea in coordination with Washington.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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