Trump becomes first sitting president to step foot into North Korea
President Trump steps into the northern side of the Military Demarcation Line that divides North and South Korea, as North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, looks on. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
By Seung Min Kim and Simon Denyer June 30 at 2:53 AM
DEMILITARIZED ZONE, South Korea — President Trump met Kim Jong Un at the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea on Sunday, and briefly crossed into North Korea, marking the first time a sitting U.S. president had done that since an armistice was signed at the end of the Korean War 66 years ago.
The two men shook hands and Kim then invited Trump to become the first U.S. president to cross into North Korea. They stayed a few minutes then both crossed back into South Korea.
“Good to see you,” Kim said. “I never expected to see you in this place.”
Kim said the very fact of them meeting had a lot of significance.
“We want to bring an end to our unpleasant past and bring in a new future, so this is a very courageous and determined act,” he said. ?“This handshake of peace itself serves to demonstrate that today is different from yesterday. ”
Trump said it was an honor to meet Kim and to cross into North Korea.
“A lot of really great things are happening, tremendous things,” he said. “We met and we liked each other from Day One, and that was very important.”
The two men then met with South Korean leader Moon Jae-in, before adjourning for talks in the Inter-Korean House of Freedom, on the southern side of the border.
Sitting down before the private talks began, Kim again underlined the importance of the meeting. “I hope it can be the foundation for better things that people will not be expecting,” he said.
“Our great relationship will provide the magical power with which to overcome hardships and obstacles in the tasks that needs to be done from now on.”
Earlier, Trump also spoke warmly of Kim.
“We’ve developed a very good relationship and we understand each other very well. I do believe he understands me, and I think I maybe understand him, and sometimes that can lead to very good things.”
South Korean President Moon Jae-in called the meeting a historic moment in the peace process on the Korean Peninsula.
Trump’s trip to South Korea comes four months after the breakdown of his second summit with Kim in Hanoi, and it remains to be seen if Sunday’s meeting will set the stage for more substantive talks.
Trump had broadcast his offer to meet Kim at the border in a morning tweet in Osaka, Japan, at the Group of 20 summit on Saturday. A senior North Korean official responded soon after that the offer was “interesting.”
Whether the meeting was really arranged in just 24 hours remains open to question — the two men also exchanged letters earlier this month — but Trump said the idea had simply occurred to him on Saturday.
“Yesterday I was just thinking ‘I am here, let’s see whether or not we can say hello to Kim Jong Un,’” he said. “I put the word out and he got back and wanted to do it from the beginning and so did I.”
It was not clear if Moon would join the two men for their private talks. Only last week, North Korea’s foreign ministry said it did not want Seoul mediating, and told South Korean authorities to “mind their own business at home.”
In any case, Moon earlier made it clear he would be taking a back seat role on Sunday.
“I will come along but the center of today’s conversation is the dialogue between North Korea and the United States,” Moon said. “I hope there would be a big progress in the dialogue between President Trump and Chairman Kim.”
Moon, who has invested heavily in improving his country’s relationship with North Korea, also praised Trump effusively for reaching out to Kim, and said Sunday’s meeting would be “a very historic and great moment for the Korea Peninsula peace process.”
“Yesterday, President Trump gave a big hope to the world through his tweet,” he said. “Seeing that tweet made me feel that the flower of peace is blossoming on the Korean Peninsula.”
In remarks to the media on Sunday, Trump repeatedly congratulated himself for calming tensions on the Korean Peninsula, arguing that the region would have been engulfed in war if he had not been elected president.
“We are in much different place than we were two and a half years ago,” he said, adding he found “insulting” that the press could say otherwise. “Let’s what happens in the end, but we are doing well.”
At the DMZ, he again attacked the media for its coverage, saying this place used to be “very dangerous” but that is was much less so since his first summit with Kim in Singapore.
“I say that for the press. They have no appreciation for what is being done, none,” he insisted.
“There was great conflict here prior to our meeting in Singapore,” he added. “After our first summit, all of the danger went away.”
Trump earlier pointed to the fact that North Korea has ceased nuclear tests, and that tensions have eased between the two countries,but he also misrepresented what had been achieved, claiming that North Korea had ceased ballistic missile tests and was continuing to send back remains of U.S. servicemen killed in the Korean War.
In fact, North Korea has tested short-range ballistic missiles since the Hanoi summit, while the Pentagon says contacts with Pyongyang over the return of remains have ceased.
Critics say Trump actually inflamed tensions dangerously in the first months of his presidency, but has now gone so far the other wayhe is rapidly legitimizing North Korea as a nuclear weapons state and letting Kim off the hook for his massive human rights violations in one of the most repressive regimes on the planet.
“At the beginning there was a lot of anger between myself and Kim Jong Un,” Trump said. “Something happened, there was a point at which it happened and all of a sudden you get along.”
Denyer reported from Seoul. Min Joo Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.
Why North Korea Has Nuclear Weapons (Is America Partially to Blame?)
"Does anyone believe Trump met Kim from a tweet? "Xi Jinping Will Make First Visit to North Korea Ahead of Meeting With Trump "Trump got played by Kim Jong Un — again"""
This, from a right of center site, looks a relatively fair and unjaundiced summary of some of the events, through many presidential terms, leading to the situation with a nuclear N Korea we have today.
The past has lessons for us.
by Sebastien Roblin October 26, 2019
Key point: North Korea's bad faith and Washington's inconsistencies combined for a disaster.
However, it’s not a simple matter to adapt civilian nuclear technology to military purposes: it’s easier to refine less concentrated nuclear fuel, adapted for release over time, than highly refined weapons-grade materials, which are primed to release energy all at once. North Korea nonetheless went about discreetly shopping for technology in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and by the 1980s had made strides refining weapons-grade plutonium at Yongbyon—producing a small quantity by the early 1990s.
Nuclear weapons also require a reliable delivery system; again China and the Soviet Union declined to furnish ballistic missiles, but Pyongyang was able to acquire secondhand Scud missiles from Egypt .. http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/how-north-korean-weapons-could-start-war-the-middle-east-23251 .. in the late 1970s, and successfully reverse-engineered them by the mid-1980s, kicking off its now-infamous ballistic-missile program.
Back in 1985, North Korea had declared it would accede to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, improving its access to civilian nuclear technology, with full compliance scheduled for 1992. However, when International Atomic Energy Association inspectors arrived, they soon found discrepancies with North Korea’s reported nuclear materials. Their attempts to visit North Korean nuclear sites were repeatedly barred. IAEA head Hans Blix proclaimed North Korea to be not in compliance with the NPT.
Caught red-handed in a lie, Pyongyang responded with a characteristic defiance: in March 1993 it declared it was withdrawing from the NPT, and kicked out the weapons inspectors.
North Korea’s Post–Cold War Blues
But North Korea was in a uniquely vulnerable position in 1993. The collapse of the Soviet Union had brought an end to the generous economic assistance that had kept its economy functioning. This, combined with floods, bad harvests and limited arable land, led to a devastating famine, which over the course of the next five years likely resulted in the death of half a million, though some estimates run much higher. Desperate North Koreans resorted to eating frogs (not a traditional dish), which rapidly disappeared as a result; many survivor accounts describe elderly relatives starving themselves to death so that young family members would receive enough food to survive.
At the same time, North Korea experienced its first transition of power in its nearly half-century-long history when Kim Il-sung died on July 8, 1994. Though Kim Jong-il’s succession may appear a foregone conclusion today, it took four years for him to fully consolidate his control. These unstable conditions meant Pyongyang was especially desperate to end its economic isolation.
In October 1994, State Department negotiators led by Ambassador-at-Large Robert Gallucci negotiated what was termed the Agreed Framework. The concise two-page document .. http://www.nti.org/media/pdfs/aptagframe.pdf .. laid out a four-point program:
(1) North Korea would cancel construction of two five-hundred-megawatt graphite-moderated reactors that were clearly designed for military purposes, despite ingenuous claims to the contrary. In compensation, the United States, South Korea and Japan would form the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), a consortium that would build two one-thousand-megawatt civilian light-water reactors in North Korea—and the United States would furnish Pyongyang with five hundred thousand tons of heavy fuel oil annually.
(2) The United States and North Korea would move toward normalizing relations and lifting economic sanctions.
(3) North Korea and the United States would exchange assurances not to employ nuclear weapons, and North-South dialogue would occur to de-escalate tensions.
(4) North Korea would accede to the NPT treaty, set aside its weapons-grade plutonium for eventual disposal and allow inspectors access to its nuclear facilities.
This was seen as an acceptable compromise, because light-water reactor technology was less easily converted to military purposes. After some delays, Pyongyang did follow through by canceling the two new reactors, granting access to IAEA inspectors and setting aside its extant nuclear fuel stocks. U.S. intelligence reports estimated that the agreement prevented North Korea from building up to a hundred nuclear weapons in the next decade.
Problem solved! But both Washington and North Korea failed to follow through, in both the letter and spirit of the agreement.
Clinton, Congress and Framework Follow-up
The Agreed Framework was not technically a “treaty,” and thus did not require a vote in Congress. This was approached was devised by the Clinton administration to avoid having the deal scrubbed by partisan politics. Indeed, two weeks after the agreement was signed,a new round of legislative elections swept the Republican Party to control of the U.S. House and Senate. Republican senators and representatives were fiercely critical of the deal, arguing it rewarded North Korean misbehavior.
The problem remained that following through on many of the U.S. promises in the deal did, in fact, require congressional approval. Though funding was grudgingly forthcoming for the fue-oil shipments, these often arrived after promised deadlines. Seoul ended up footing most of the $4.6 billion bill for the light-water reactors, but progress by KEDO proved slow, and only preliminary work had begun by the provisional “due date” of 2003.
Perceiving further concessions as being politically untenable, the Clinton administration largely gave up on following through with the rest of the Agreed Framework, and made few serious attempts at lifting sanctions or formally ending the Korean War—which was still officially ongoing a half century after fighting had ended. Later, some Clinton-era officials admitted they had expected North Korea to collapse on its own before the light-water reactors were ever constructed.
But what Washington regarded as vaguely worded rhetoric about warmer relations was seen as a vital assurance to an insecure, famine-wracked North Korea.Pyongyang interpreted the failure of what was then the world’s only superpower to follow through in the most paranoid light.
North Korean Uranium Cheating
Washington may not have sustained serious engagement with North Korea, but Seoul bent over backwards, making friendly gestures and providing economic aid through the “Sunshine Policy” under the liberal governments of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun from 1998 to 2008. International food aid would help bring the North Korean famine under control by 1998.
At the same time, having had its plutonium-bomb program constrained by the agreement, North Korea instead secretly began work on producing a uranium bomb.
The “Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a uranium weapon, but today nearly all nuclear weapons use plutonium-239. Though the uranium bomb amounted to a slower, less effective path to nuclear weaponry, it still could be developed into deadly weapons. Pakistani nuclear physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan transferred nuclear technology to North Korea through a proliferation network between 1991 and 1997, both before and after the Framework—a move that he claims was ordered by the Pakistani government in exchange for North Korea’s ballistic-missile technology.
Kim Jong-il and Bush Blow Up the Framework
In the final year of the Clinton administration, it belatedly followed through with making assurances of “no hostile intent” from U.S. military forces and removing certain sanctions. However, the former measure was rescinded the following year under the George W. Bush administration, which reinstated North Korea as a potential target in its Nuclear Posture Review.
Though Secretary of State Colin Powell was in favor of continuing engagement with Pyongyang, he was overruled by neoconservatives in the Bush administration, who favored confrontation and possible “regime change” (i.e., war). After the 9/11 attacks, North Korea was labeled part of the “Axis of Evil.”
The CIA had pieced together evidence of the North Korean uranium-enrichment program, including shipments of centrifuges from Pakistan and Russia. In December 2002, James Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, went to Pyongyang and confronted a negotiator with evidence of North Korea’s uranium program. The negotiator then reportedly admitted to the existence of the program in somewhat cagey terms, and suggested uranium enrichment could be abandoned in exchange for the United States following through with other Framework preventions, such as the normalization of relations and removal of sanctions. (North Korea later claimed, incredibly and somewhat incoherently, that its negotiator had been mistranslated, and had only argued for its hypothetical right to uranium enrichment—which, by the way, was only for civilian purposes.)
This apparent belligerent admission led the Bush administration to cut off the fuel oil shipments. Within a few weeks, Pyongyang retaliated by announcing it was withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and reclaiming nuclear fuel from the IAEA. KEDO was effectively nixed as well. Pyongyang’s nuclear-weapons program kicked back into full gear.
Page 2
In the subsequent months, Pyongyang would closely observe the U.S. invasion of Iraq, another country run by a despotic regime that had nonetheless allowed the entry of international inspectors and, as it turned out, abandoned its nuclear- and chemical-weapons programs. This event reinforced Pyongyang’s determination that nuclear weapons, not adherence to treaties and bargains, were a surer guarantee of the regime’s survival.
Three years later, on October 9, 2006, North Korea performed its first detonation of a nuclear device at Punggye-ri. In the subsequent years, the Bush administration would offer Pyongyang generous concessions, and even removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, in a belated attempt to secure its re-adherence to a nonproliferation regime. But the Kim dynasty was now determined to acquire nuclear weapons, and multiple rounds of talks did little to meaningfully divert it.
Pyongyang clearly acted in bad faith when it continued its uranium-enrichment program, and it repeatedly used noncompliance with earlier agreements it had made as bargaining chips for future concessions. However, this does not change the role that inconsistent diplomatic engagement from Washington played in persuading Pyongyang to double down on its nuclear program at the expense of pursuing other paths.
Sébastien Roblin holds a master’s degree in conflict resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring .. https://warisboring.com/ . This article first appeared last year.
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