WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un say they have the same goal — denuclearization of the Korean peninsula — at their upcoming summit in Singapore.
But they disagree fundamentally about what that would look like.
The dispute over the shape, scope and speed of a potential disarmament has stymied international efforts to stop or roll back North Korea’s nuclear weapons program for three decades. It arguably poses the biggest obstacle to a successful summit now that it is back on track for June 12.
Reconciling or finessing that gap — and determining what the secretive police state would get in return for handing over or dismantling its nuclear arsenal — could make the difference between a deal or no deal after the haggling starts.
“The common mistake is to assume when the North Koreans talk about denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, they’re talking about giving up all their weapons,” said Victor Cha, who headed Asian affairs in the National Security Council under President George W. Bush and who participated took in nuclear talks with North Korea at the time.
“It’s not really the way we look at it, which is ‘Crate it up and take it out,” said Cha, who now heads the Korea program at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Rather, he said, North Koreans view denuclearization as a long-term aspiration, the way Americans talk of someday abolishing nuclear weapons worldwide. North Korea has a long list of other grievances, and could demand the removal of U.S. troops, or even the U.S. nuclear umbrella, from South Korea.
“It’s an endless list,” said Michael Green, another veteran of Bush administration negotiations with North Korea. “They will keep adding to the list of things we have to do in order for them to denuclearize until the cows come home.”
The broad parameters of a potential deal are well-established. The U.S. side wants North Korea to give up the estimated 20 to 60 nuclear weapons that it has built, and the infrastructure that created them, and presumably the ballistic missiles that can hurl them across the Pacific.
In exchange, Trump can offer U.S. security guarantees for the regime in Pyongyang, better relations with Washington and its allies in Japan and South Korea and easing of international economic sanctions that have strangled North Korea’s ability to trade with the outside world. Trump has signaled that he won’t offer financial aid, though he has suggested he would ask Asian allies to do so.
Whether that’s enough — or whether North Korea is really prepared to give up a weapons program that has consumed much of the impoverished country’s energy and resources for decades — remains to be seen.
