There are media reports that Moon may attend the historic meeting in Singapore
In the tug of war between the United States and North Korea over the tentative summit in Singapore, South Korean President Moon Jae-in is the man in the precarious middle, trying to broker a high-stakes meeting between two unconventional leaders.
There are media reports that Moon may attend the historic meeting in Singapore.
“The discussions are just getting started, so we are still waiting to see how they come out, but… (Moon) could join President Trump and (North Korean leader) Kim (Jong Un) in Singapore,” a senior official with Moon’s office told Yonhap news agency on condition of anonymity.
Moon’s role as a mediator came into sharp focus in the past week, after President Donald Trump cancelled the summit in a letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
As Kim sought to reopen talks, he turned to Moon. In less than 24 hours, Moon’s motorcade snaked through traffic to cross the demilitarised zone for a meeting.
Then, on Sunday, US officials crossed the DMZ into North Korea for talks to prepare for the potential June 12 summit, even as its fate remained uncertain.
The fact that talks resumed a day after the surprise inter-Korean meeting was viewed by Moon’s supporters as a sign of his increasingly effective role.
In a briefing Sunday, Moon said he hopes for an eventual trilateral summit.
He described the US-North Korea summit as a key first step in achieving his goal of a formal declaration ending the Korean war.
“Every effort I am making now is on one hand to improve inter-Korean relations, and on the other hand, to ensure the success of the North Korea-U. S. summit, which is essential to improving inter-Korean relations,” Moon said. “I hope that if the North Korea-U. S. summit is successful, the declaration of the Korean war will be pursued through the trilateral summit.”
Moon had pledged during his 2017 campaign to take the “driver’s seat” to achieve denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.
His conservative critics, however, say Moon should be reinforcing the US-South Korea alliance rather than acting as a neutral facilitator between North Korea and the United States.
They also say Moon is setting unrealistic expectations and masking fundamental gaps between the two sides on the definition of denuclearisation.
Moon’s rapprochement with the North has divided the South Korean government.
On Monday, the legislature failed to ratify the “Panmunjom Declaration”, an agreement Kim and Moon signed at a summit in April to seek “a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.”
Moon and the governing Democratic Party have sought to guarantee that the agreement becomes law and can be enforced regardless of a change in government.
But conservative lawmakers accuse the governing party of using the three-page agreement, which they note is short on details, for political gain ahead of local elections in June.
