President Trump Meets North Korea’s Kim Jong Un at High-Stakes Summit
U.S. challenge now is to make tangible headway toward curbing Pyongyang’s nuclear programs
By Michael R. Gordon, Vivian Salama and Jonathan Cheng
Updated Feb. 27, 2019 7:18 a.m. ET
HANOI—President Trump kicked off a round of high-stakes summitry with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his trademark improvisational style—with a one-on-one pre-dinner chat at a hotel in the Vietnamese capital on Wednesday.
The two leaders’ meetings here present a serious test of their ability to make tangible headway toward curbing Pyongyang’s nuclear programs, after their first meeting last year in Singapore yielded plenty of bonhomie but little concrete progress.
After shaking hands with Mr. Kim, Mr. Trump said he had a “great relationship” with the North Korean dictator. He said he would help North Korea rapidly become an economic powerhouse—if only it would give up its atomic weapons and the facilities to develop them.
“Your country has tremendous economic potential, unbelievable, unlimited,” Mr. Trump said, sitting next to his North Korean counterpart. “I look forward to watching it happen and to helping it to happen and we will help it to happen.”
The two leaders smiled at each other and Mr. Trump repeatedly patted Mr. Kim on the arm during their brief public appearance.
Mr. Kim expressed hope that “we will be successful this time.”
But even as Mr. Trump held out the lure of a breakthrough, the two countries appeared to be heading into a deliberate and step-by-step negotiation in which gradual North Korean moves toward denuclearization could be rewarded with political measures and an easing of economic sanctions.
President Trump shakes hands with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un during Wednesday’s meeting in Hanoi.
President Trump shakes hands with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un during Wednesday’s meeting in Hanoi. Photo: saul loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
That approach is a far cry from the administration’s initial hope to carry out denuclearization during Mr. Trump’s first term in return for sanctions relief—an approach senior U.S. officials had dubbed the “big bang.”
The top-level meetings here were preceded by days of talks between the U.S. special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Hyok Chol.
Impending fireworks back in Washington, meanwhile, cast a shadow over the nuclear summit. In testimony to Congress on Wednesday, Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, was set to accuse Mr. Trump of criminal behavior while in office.
“He is lying in order to reduce his prison time,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Wednesday, referring to Mr. Cohen.
The Congressional hearing added to political pressure on Mr. Trump to come away from Vietnam with a substantial nuclear agreement that he could hold up as a win for himself and the U.S.
The U.S. challenge now in Hanoi is to see if the warm embrace between Messrs. Trump and Kim can be matched by diplomatic progress to curtail or freeze, if not eliminate, the North’s nuclear capabilities. For Pyongyang, the goal would be to achieve major sanctions relief, perhaps by getting U.S. support to renew South Korean participation in the Kaesong industrial zone in North Korea and other joint economic ventures between the two Koreas.
There are building blocks for a potential interim compromise. In his New Year’s address and at a meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in October last year, Mr. Kim indicated that he could freeze his atomic-weapons production and shut down one of the most visible components of it—the Yongbyon nuclear complex—if Washington would agree to take “corresponding measures.”
Such a deal could enable Mr. Trump to say he had begun to roll back the North’s weapons programs while Washington continues to pursue full denuclearization in coming years.
A senior Trump administration official said last week that the U.S. understood the need for a phased approach but didn’t want to take incremental steps. “We need to move quickly and in very big bites,” he said.
But the price the U.S. is prepared to pay for such steps could be far less than the North would be willing to accept. U.S. officials have spoken about the possibility—in return for substantial steps on the North Koreans’ part—to exchange liaison offices and perhaps issue a joint statement that hostilities on the Korean Peninsula have ended, which would have enormous symbolic importance but would stop short of a formal peace treaty ending the Korean War.
Pyongyang, however, has indicated that it wants major sanctions relief. While the U.S. has signaled some flexibility on the economic front, it doesn’t want to lift what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called “core” U.N. Security Council sanctions for fear that it would lose its remaining leverage to try to eliminate the North’s arsenal.
“There are other things we could do—exchanges of people, lots of other ways that North Korea is sanctioned today,” Mr. Pompeo said Sunday.
U.S. economic leverage, however, may be on the wane. North Korea has so far managed to weather Mr. Trump’s nearly two-year “maximum pressure” campaign, according to recent defectors and humanitarian aid workers who have traveled through the country in recent months.
A forthcoming report by a U.N. panel of experts points to continuing difficulties in enforcing sanctions, including continued ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum goods headed for North Korea, diplomats say. The North has more than two dozen bank representatives in nearly half a dozen countries, in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions. And the country is selling arms and military technology to groups in Africa and the Middle East, including Iran. Pyongyang gets even more money through cyber attacks, the report notes.
The concessions that Washington might be able to extract from Pyongyang, too, are likely limited in nature and potentially focused around the complete or partial dismantlement of the Yongbyon site. Mr. Biegun indicated in a speech last month that the Americans were no longer insisting that Pyongyang quickly turn over an inventory listing its nuclear and missile sites.
A broader freeze on the North’s weapons-of-mass-destruction and missile programs, including formalizing Pyongyang’s self-imposed moratorium on nuclear tests and missile launches, would also be significant militarily, according to Pentagon officials, as it would preclude Pyongyang from developing the technology to have confidence that it could strike targets on U.S. territory with an intercontinental ballistic missile.
There has yet to be evidence of a reliable re-entry vehicle, Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last year, referring to a critical component of a viable nuclear-armed ICBM.
“We have not seen a demonstration of a reliable arming, targeting and fusing system that would allow the system to survive and actually detonate when he wants it to detonate,” he said.
Eight senior Democratic senators wrote to Mr. Trump earlier this week that the Singapore summit succeeded primarily in legitimizing Mr. Kim’s role on the world stage and that solid progress to roll back the North’s arsenal is needed now.
With his eye on his critics in Washington, Mr. Trump fired back Wednesday, tweeting that the Democrats should “ask themselves why they didn’t do ‘it’ during eight years of the Obama administration.”
Write to Michael R. Gordon at
michael.gordon@wsj.com, Vivian Salama at
vivian.salama@wsj.com and Jonathan Cheng at
jonathan.cheng@wsj.com