Daily Times

For a few months, everything seemed to be clicking for South Korean President Moon Jae-in as he pieced together crucial nuclear negotiations between the US and North Korea following a year of intense animosity.

But he now enters a White House meeting with President Donald Trump with his status in the diplomatic driver’s seat in doubt.

Pyongyang’s surprise move last week to break off a high-level meeting with Seoul over US-South Korean military drills while threatening to cancel next month’s summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Trump cooled what had been an unusual flurry of diplomatic moves from the country after a provocative series of nuclear and missile tests.

It also underscored Seoul’s delicate role as an intermediary between Washington and Pyongyang and raised questions about Moon’s claim that Kim has genuine intent to deal away his nukes.

Seoul may lose much of its voice if Trump chooses to deal more directly with China, North Korea’s only major ally, which is refusing to be sidelined in the global diplomatic push to resolve the nuclear standoff.

Seoul’s presidential office said this week’s meeting between Moon and Trump will be mainly focused on preparing Trump for his summit with Kim, scheduled for June 12 in Singapore.

A look ahead at the Moon-Trump meeting and the challenges they face with Kim:

White House To Singapore

Seoul insists Kim can be persuaded to abandon his nuclear facilities, materials and bombs in a verifiable and irreversible way in exchange for credible security and economic guarantees.

Moon and Trump will likely discuss potential steps that Trump can put on the table in Singapore. Their meeting at the White House may also include discussions on setting up three-way talks with Pyongyang or four-way talks also including Beijing to negotiate a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.

Moon and Trump may exchange views on whether the allies should temporarily modify their joint military drills while engaging in denuclearization negotiations with North Korea, said Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Dongguk University and a policy adviser to Moon. There could also be deeper discussions on the future of the US-South Korea alliance.

South Korea maintains an optimistic outlook for the Trump-Kim talks. Moon’s foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, told South Korean lawmakers last week that the North has issued a commitment for “complete denuclearization.” However, she said there’s a “difference in opinions between the North and the United States over the methods to achieve denuclearization.”

Officials in Washington have talked about a comprehensive one-shot deal where the North fully eliminates its nukes first and receives rewards later. But Kim, through two separate summits with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in March and May, has called for a phased and synchronized process where every action he takes is met with a reciprocal reward from the United States.

The Dreaded ‘D’ Word

Despite Seoul’s reassurances, it remains unclear whether Kim will ever agree to fully relinquish his nukes, which he likely sees as his only guarantee of survival. For decades, North Korea has been pushing a concept of “denuclearization” that bears no resemblance to the American definition, vowing to pursue nuclear development unless Washington removes its troops from South Korea and the nuclear umbrella defending South Korea and Japan.

Kim declared his nuclear force as complete in November, following the country’s third flight test of an intercontinental ballistic missile. At a ruling party meeting in April, the North announced that it was suspending all nuclear and ICBM tests and will close its nuclear testing ground because its mission had come “to an end.” The announcements were clearly designed to communicate that Kim sees himself as entering the negotiations with Trump from a position of strength and expects to be treated as a leader of a full-fledged nuclear state.

“The success of the Trump-Kim meeting will be determined by whether it turns out to be a denuclearization negotiation or an arms reduction negotiation between two nuclear states,” said Du Hyeogn Cha, a visiting scholar at Seoul’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies. “So far, the North has built conditions for the meeting to become the latter.”

Published in Daily Times, May 22^nd 2018.