Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s leader, will meet Donald Trump, the US president, in Washington on Tuesday for talks on how to keep a June Singapore summit with North Korea on track, amid growing concerns that Washington will not be able to strike a deal on denuclearisation.
Their meeting had been scheduled for some time, to fine-tune the details of how Mr Trump should approach his June 12 summit with Kim Jong-un. But Mr Moon’s trip has now evolved into a crisis session after an unexpectedly fractious week during which Pyongyang threatened to pull out of the summit altogether.
After months of warm relations between South and North Korea that began with the Winter Olympics, the mood suddenly soured last week when Pyongyang hit out over joint US-South Korean military exercises that it believes are a rehearsal for invasion, calling Seoul “ignorant and incompetent”.
The North abruptly cancelled a high-level meeting with the South on Wednesday and then took aim at John Bolton, the US national security adviser, for suggesting they could follow a so-called “Libya model” of denuclearisation. Libya, they retorted, had met a “miserable fate”.
Despite the tensions, Nam Gwan-pyo, a deputy director at the presidential national security office, told the Yonhap news agency that Tuesday’s meeting would “play a role as a bridge” between the US and North Korea, to ensure the success of the upcoming summit with Kim.
They would likely discuss “ways to guarantee a bright future for the North when North Korea achieves complete denuclearisation,” he added. Mr Moon is also expected to advise the US president on what to expect from Kim, based on his own encounter with him at a summit on the inter-Korean border in April.
But Mr Moon may also face tough questions from the US president over whether he and his administration, in their eagerness to make progress with the North, may have exaggerated Kim’s willingness to negotiate over the dismantling of his nuclear weapons programme.
“It increasingly looks like the Moon administration overstated North Korea’s willingness to deal. Moon will probably get an earful over that,” tweeted Robert Kelly, a professor of political science at South Korea’s Busan university.
The Trump administration is also reported to be concerned that Mr Moon may push for a less stringent version of North Korean denuclearisation and could be open to faster sanctions relief.
South Korean officials said Mr Moon and Mr Trump would speak to each other alone, only accompanied by interpreters.
“The fact that the two leaders will hold talks with no other attendants is important. It will likely be a chance for them to share their inner-most thoughts,” said one official.
The two leaders already spoke for 20 minutes on the phone on Sunday, in their 15th phone conversation since they both took office.
The New York Times interpreted the call, just three days before Mr Moon was due to land in Washington anyway, as a sign of Mr Trump’s discomfort with North Korea’s outburst last week, and his reported concerns that his summit with Kim could turn into a political embarrassment.
It emerged on Monday that a White House Military Office coin had already been minted to mark the summit’s occasion, showing the busts of Mr Trump and “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-un.
Administration officials told the Times that the president had been surprised and angered by a statement from the North’s chief nuclear negotiator late last week that the country would not trade away its nuclear weapons capability in exchange for economic aid.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that Mr Bolton does not trust that the summit will go well, even though aides have stressed that the president is still committed to go ahead.
“It doesn’t look like they want to denuclearise at all,” said an unnamed US official about the North Koreans, echoing long-standing warnings from North Korea experts that Pyongyang will not simply hand over its entire nuclear arsenal, which it regards as a security guarantee, but instead expects mutual disarmament.
Many analysts fear that the collapse of the Singapore talks could accelerate military confrontation.
On Monday, Mike Pence, the US vice-president, compounded those fears, telling Fox News that North Korea could end up like Libya if it failed to make a nuclear deal with Washington.
“There was some talk about the Libyan model last week, and you know, as the President made clear, this will only end like the Libyan model ended if Kim Jong-un doesn’t make a deal,” he said.