Next week’s inter-Korean summit will test whether South Korean President Moon Jae-in can pull off his role of mediator and salvage stalled nuclear…
Next week’s inter-Korean summit will test whether South Korean President Moon Jae-in can pull off his role of mediator and salvage stalled nuclear talks between Pyongyang and Washington.
Moon will cross the border into the North for his third meeting with Kim Jong Un on Tuesday, amid scepticism over whether the North Korean leader was serious about denuclearization, a goal vowed at his summit with U. S. President Donald Trump in June.
Trump last week asked Moon to act as “chief negotiator” between Washington and Pyongyang, according to Moon’s spokesman, after Trump canceled a visit to Pyongyang by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last month.
Moon will discuss ways to achieve that goal with Kim, seeking to engineer a proposal that combines a concrete framework for North Korea’s denuclearization and a joint declaration ending the 1950-53 Korean War, Seoul officials said.
The South Korean scheme would call for Pyongyang to promise to reveal or declare its nuclear and missile facilities, followed by a joint end-of-war declaration, two sources familiar with the issue said. North Korea would then provide an actual list of the sites for verification and eventual decommissioning by international inspectors, said the sources who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Pyongyang and Washington have been at odds over whether the North’s denuclearization or declaring a formal end to the war should come first.
The Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty, leaving U. S.-led U. N. forces including South Korea technically still at war with the North.
“The deadlock resulted from mutual demands that the other side take action first, and I think we can surely find a point of contact,” Moon Jae-in told a meeting on Thursday with advisers on the summit.
“One of the roles we should play in the middle is to find the point of contact and present it, and expedite dialogue again to accelerate the denuclearization process.”
South Korea is pinning high hopes on Kim’s remarks to Moon’s special envoys last week that he wants to realize denuclearization within Trump’s first term in office ending in early 2021, the first time line he has ever given.
In another upbeat sign, Kim has offered a second summit in a “very warm, very positive” letter to Trump, and the White House said it is looking at scheduling one.
