Tuesday, February 26, 2019
Associated Press
WASHINGTON
Redefining success, President Donald Trump headed to his second meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un on Monday, determined to tamp down expectations that he’ll achieve big strides toward denuclearization. Yet he was still eager to claim an attention-grabbing victory to offset the political turmoil he faces at home.
Trump is set to land in Vietnam late today and will have meetings with the host country’s president and prime minister the next day before the president and Kim greet one another and sit down Wednesday for a private dinner.
Trump will be joined at the dinner by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, the White House said Monday. Kim also will have two aides with him, and there will be translators for both sides. Trump and Kim, who traveled to the summit by train and car, will have a series of official meetings Thursday.
Trump laid out ultimate goals for both the U.S. and Kim in an appearance before the nation’s governors Monday before boarding Air Force One to fly to Vietnam: “We want denuclearization, and I think he’ll have a country that will set a lot of records for speed in terms of an economy.”
Worries abound across world capitals about what Trump might be willing to give up in the name of a win, but there seems less mystery about his North Korean counterpart. Survival of the Kim regime is always the primary concern.
Trump was the driving force behind this week’s summit, aiming to re-create the global spectacle of his first meeting with Kim last year. But that initial summit in Singapore yielded few concrete results, and the months that followed have produced little optimism about what will be achieved in the sequel.
Trump is publicly unconcerned.
He once warned that North Korea’s arsenal posed such a threat to humanity that he might have no choice but to rain “fire and fury” on the nation. However, in the lead-up to the new summit, he’s proclaimed himself in no hurry for Pyongyang to prove it is abandoning its weapons.
“I’m not in a rush. I don’t want to rush anybody. I just don’t want testing. As long as there’s no testing, we’re happy,” Trump told the governors Sunday.
In fact, he is ready to write himself into the history books before he and Kim even shake hands in Hanoi.
“If I were not elected president, you would have been in a war with North Korea,” Trump said last week. “We now have a situation where the relationships are good – where there has been no nuclear testing, no missiles, no rockets.”
While Trump was airborne, Kim’s armored train was on the move in China, bound toward Vietnam’s capital. Vietnamese officials promised security at “the maximum level.” Reporters from 40 nations were expected to transmit the story to the world.
Kim inherited a nascent nuclear program from his father, and after years of accelerated effort and fighting through crippling sanctions, he built an arsenal that demonstrated the potential to rocket a thermonuclear weapon to the mainland United States. That is the fundamental reason Washington now sits at the negotiating table.
Kim, his world standing elevated after receiving an audience with a U.S. president, has yet to show a convincing sign that he is willing to deal away an arsenal that might provide a stronger guarantee of survival than whatever security assurance the United States could provide. The North Koreans have largely eschewed staff-level talks, pushing for discussions between Trump and Kim.
Though details of the summit remain closely held, the two leaders are expected to meet at some point one-on-one, joined only by translators.
The easing of tension between the two nations, Trump and his allies contend, stems from the U.S. president’s own unorthodox and unpredictable style of diplomacy. Often prizing personal rapport over long-held strategic interests, Trump has pointed to his budding relationship with the young and reclusive leader, frequently showing visitors to the Oval Office his flattering letters from Kim.
Trump, who has long declared that North Korea represented the gravest foreign threat of his presidency, told reporters recently that his efforts to defang Pyongyang had moved Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize, something Abe would not confirm or deny.
Four main goals emerged from the first Trump-Kim summit: establishing new relations between the nations, building a new peace on the entire Korean Peninsula, completing denuclearization of the peninsula and recovering U.S. POW/MIA remains from the Korean War.
While some remains have been returned to the United States, little has been achieved on the other points. Korean and American negotiators have not settled on either the parameters of denuclearization or a timetable for the removal of both Korean weapons and American sanctions.
“The key lessons of Singapore are that President Trump sees tremendous value in the imagery of diplomacy and wants to be seen as a bold leader, even if the substance of the diplomacy is far behind the pageantry,” said Abraham Denmark, director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.