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U.S. ready to resume North Korea talks, seeks denuclearization by 2021

South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un pose for photographs on the top of Mt. Paektu, North Korea September 20, 2018. Pyeongyang Press Corps/Pool via REUTERS

By Lesley Wroughton and Hyonhee Shin

WASHINGTON/SEOUL (Reuters) – The United States said it was ready to resume talks with North Korea after Pyongyang pledged on Wednesday to dismantle its key missile facilities and suggested it would close its main Yongbyon nuclear complex if Washington took unspecified actions.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he had invited North Korea’s foreign minister to meet in New York next week, with the aim of completing its denuclearization by January 2021, after a Pyongyang summit between the leaders of the two Koreas.

The United States appeared eager to seize on commitments by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at his talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in even as critics said the steps did little to put Pyongyang on a course for irreversible denuclearization.

North Korea will allow experts from “concerned countries” to watch the closure of its missile engine testing site and launch pad at Tongchang-ri, Moon said at a joint news conference with Kim after their meeting in the North Korean capital.

North Korea will also take additional steps such as closing its main Yongbyon nuclear complex if the United States undertook unspecified reciprocal measures, Moon added.

The sudden revival of diplomacy followed weeks of doubts in U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration’s about whether North Korea was willing to negotiate in good faith after a June summit between Trump and Kim yielded few tangible results.

The January 2021 completion date was the most specific deadline set in what is expected to be a long process of trying to get the North to end its nuclear program, which may threaten U.S. allies South Korea and Japan as well as the U.S. homeland.

In addition to inviting North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho to meet when both are in New York next week for the annual U.N. General Assembly gathering of world leaders, Pompeo said Washington invited Pyongyang’s representatives to meet the U.S. special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, in Vienna at the “earliest opportunity.”

China, North Korea’s most important economic backer and diplomatic ally, said it warmly welcomed the agreement reached in Pyongyang and strongly supported it.

“We absolutely cannot let this hard to come by opportunity for peace slip away once again,” the Chinese government’s top diplomat, State Councillor Wang Yi, said in a statement.

SKEPTICISM

Some U.S. officials were deeply skeptical. Speaking before Pompeo’s announcement, two senior U.S. officials involved in U.S.-North Korea policy voiced fears Kim was trying to drive a wedge between Washington and Seoul.

At the summit, the two Koreas agreed on plans to resume economic cooperation, including working to reconnect rail and road links. They agreed as well to restart a joint factory park in a border city of Kaesong and tours to the North’s Mount Kumgang resort when conditions are met.

U.S. officials suggested Kim was trying to ease the economic pressure on him to curb his nuclear programs and to undercut the rationale for U.S. troops being based in South Korea by improving relations with Seoul.

The United States has some 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea to deter North Korean attack. Pyongyang has long sought their withdrawal and Trump has questioned their rationale and cost.

“There is nothing the North has offered so far that would constitute irreversible movement toward denuclearization, however you define that, by January 2021 or any other time, or even a reduction of the military threat it poses to the South and the region,” said a U.S. intelligence official.

“Everything that’s out there now is conditional on U.S. actions that would reduce the pressure on the North to cooperate or (is) filled with loopholes and exit ramps,” added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

U.S. officials said the ambiguity about what Washington was supposed to do for the North to close its nuclear complex at Yongbyon gave Kim room to argue that Washington had not done enough for North Korea to follow through on its pledges.

TRUMP: ‘HE’S CALM, I’M CALM’

Even if North Korea were to shut down Yongbyon, officials and experts believe it has other secret nuclear facilities.

South Korea’s national security adviser, Chung Eui-yong, said the reciprocal U.S. steps could include an end-of-war declaration. South Korea and the United States remain technically at war with North Korea because the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice and not a peace treaty.

Though Wednesday’s inter-Korean agreement failed to stipulate the North’s commitment to declare nuclear and missile facilities for inspection and eventual decommissioning, Seoul has been in talks with both Pyongyang and Washington over the issue, a senior South Korean official said.

“What North Korea really wants and their priorities may be different from ours,” the official told reporters on Thursday on condition of anonymity.

“We’re talking about a package that would carry many elements, including the declaration of the facilities, Yongbyon and Tongchang-ri, which are of U.S. interest, and from the Northside, the issues of normalizing relations, ending the war and easing sanctions.”

Despite the doubts of U.S. officials and outside analysts, North Korea’s pledge at the summit with the South Korean president drew an enthusiastic response from Trump.

Speaking before Pompeo’s comments, Trump‏ welcomed Kim’s pledges, calling them part of “tremendous progress” with Pyongyang on a number of fronts, and hailing “very good news” from the summit between the Koreas.

“He’s calm, I’m calm – so we’ll see what happens,” Trump, who last year threatened to destroy North Korea, told reporters.

‘THEATRICAL PROMISES’

Kim pledged to work toward the “complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula” during two meetings with Moon earlier this year and at his summit with Trump.

But discussions over how to implement the vague commitments have since faltered and North Korea has consistently refused to give up its nuclear arsenal unilaterally.

Washington has demanded concrete action, such as a full disclosure of North Korea’s nuclear and missile facilities, before agreeing to Pyongyang’s key goals, including an easing of international sanctions and an official end to the Korean War.

While North Korea has stopped nuclear and missile tests in the past year, it did not allow international inspections of its dismantling of its Punggye-ri nuclear test site in May, drawing criticism that its action was for show and could be reversed.

The day after the June 12 Trump-Kim summit, Pompeo said he hoped to achieve “major disarmament” by North Korea by the end of Trump’s first term in January 2021.

His latest statement that the process “should be completed by January 2021” may be a signal Washington will not wait forever.

“The statement clearly implies that inter-Korean summits and theatrical promises to dismantle the odd facility simply can’t substitute for a negotiating process on the nuclear issue,” said the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Daniel Russel.

“Invoking the end of Trump’s term in January 2021 is another way of saying to the North that American patience is not unlimited and that Kim Jong Un won’t be able to sidestep denuclearization indefinitely,” Russel added.

(Reporting by Lesley Wroughton in Washington and Hyonhee Shin in Seoul; Additional reporting by Joyce Lee, Soyoung Kim and Joint Press Corps, Jeongmin Kim, Haejin Choi and Ju-min Park in Seoul, Ben Blanchard and Zhang Min in Beijing, and Roberta Rampton, David Brunnstrom and John Walcott in Washington; Writing by Yara Bayoumy and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by David Gregorio, Peter Cooney and Lincoln Feast.)

As talks with North near, South Korea sees familiar hurdles ahead

FILE PHOTO: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watches the launch of a Hwasong-12 missile in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on September 16, 2017. KCNA via REUTERS/File Photo

By Hyonhee Shin

SEOUL (Reuters) – With the specter of two past summits that failed to blunt North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, South Korean officials planning talks next month now face the thorny task of overcoming familiar sticking points with the threat of war looming over any failure.

A South Korean delegation returned home on Tuesday from a first-ever meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, to announce the agreement on a North-South summit next month, the first since 2007.

Seoul officials see the talks as the starting point of President Moon Jae-in’s initiative to denuclearize and build lasting peace on the peninsula, beginning with a freeze in the North’s nuclear program and ending in its complete abolishment.

“While pursuing a fundamental resolution of the standoff, we need to take some initial denuclearization steps, putting a halt to further testing and returning to dialogue,” a senior South Korean government official said on condition of anonymity.

“One could argue we would be deceived by the North as we have been for the last 20 years, but that’s the past – we have different people and different programs now,” the official said.

Moon said on Wednesday he had suggested to the North a rough roadmap progressing from a nuclear freeze to denuclearization, an opposition party chair told reporters after meeting with him.

But Moon said there won’t be “many agreements” to come out of the summit, according to a ruling party lawmaker who took part in the meeting.

Moon also called a 2005 deal of six-nation nuclear talks, under which Pyogyang agreed to give up its nuclear program in return for economic and energy aid and an end to its diplomatic isolation, a “failed model”, the first politician said.

FAMILIAR PATTERN

Former officials in Washington and Tokyo reacted with scepticism to the North’s offer of talks on denuclearization, seeing a familiar pattern of threats followed by talks that fail to win significant concessions.

Chief among the disagreements that have scuttled past efforts to defuse the standoff is North Korea’s requests for security guarantees in return for abandoning its nuclear weapons.

During talks with Moon’s envoys this week, the North expressed its willingness to denuclearize if military threats against it are eliminated, and the security of its regime is guaranteed, without presenting precise conditions.

“(North Korea) has never said what they mean by the guarantee of regime security,” one former senior South Korean official told Reuters.

“That means it’s up to them to decide whether the security is guaranteed or not, and that means they have full control.”

Pyongyang has protested South Korea-U.S. joint military drills as a rehearsal of war.

It has also called the roughly 28,000 American troops stationed in South Korea a potential invasion force that can only be countered by a robust nuclear deterrent.

The North’s official KCNA news agency said on Wednesday the United States is “getting frantic” with the deployment of U.S. troops on the Korean peninsula and their drills to get “familiar with its terrain and arms buildup there”.

Moon’s special advisor Moon Chung-in has raised the possibility for a possible pullout of U.S. forces, saying the president has the right to “let them out”.

Moon declined to comment on the summit, saying: “We will see.”

SECURITY GUARANTEE?

Any discussion of a U.S. troop withdrawal will be fraught, however, as both Seoul and Washington see them as a bulwark against North Korean provocations.

“For the North, a peace treaty and denuclearization means the removal of U.S. forces from not only the peninsula but also Japan and other bases in the Pacific theater,” said Kim Young-mok, a former South Korean diplomat who was involved in the making of a 1994 freeze-for-aid framework deal between Pyongyang and Washington.

“We responded by pledging non-aggression, but I guess it wasn’t enough.”

South Korean officials expect the issue to arise again, but are hoping Pyongyang won’t make impossible demands.

Another senior official acknowledged the difficulty in making progress in any peace talks without addressing the issue of eliminating the military threat to North Korea and guaranteeing the security of its regime.

“The North bring up disarmament talks and the withdrawal of U.S. forces”, the official said.

“If they do, things could get ugly quickly despite the summit, and the South Korea-U.S. alliance would face serious problems. But if the North were to move things forward, they would hopefully present something more realistic.”

Wi Sung-lac, a former South Korean nuclear negotiator, said there needs to be clearer mutual understanding of the definition of denuclearization to facilitate future talks.

“It’s unlikely to see any tangible outcome on the nuclear issue before the summit,” he said.

“The United States and North Korea could sit together at the negotiating table in the meantime, which would provide better optics for the summit but probably not in terms of substance.”

(Reporting by Hyonhee Shin; Additional reporting by Christine Kim; Editing by Josh Smith and Lincoln Feast)

U.S. flies bombers over Korean peninsula after North Korea missile test

One of two U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer bombers flies a 10-hour mission from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, into Japanese airspace and over the Korean Peninsula,

By James Pearson and Michelle Nichols

SEOUL/NEW YORK (Reuters) – The United States flew two supersonic B-1B bombers over the Korean peninsula in a show of force on Sunday and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said China, Japan and South Korea needed to do more after Pyongyang’s latest missile tests.

North Korea said it conducted another successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) on Friday that proved its ability to strike America’s mainland, drawing a sharp warning from U.S. President Donald Trump.

Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said on Twitter on Sunday that the United States was “done talking” about North Korea, which was “not only a U.S. problem.”

“China is aware they must act,” Haley said, urging Japan and South Korea to increase pressure and calling for an international solution.

China, the North’s main ally, said it opposed North Korea’s missile launches, which it said violate UN Security Council resolutions designed to curb Pyongyang’s banned nuclear and missile programs.

“At the same time, China hopes all parties act with caution, to prevent tensions from continuing to escalate,” China’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Saturday.

Early in his presidency, Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and had expressed hope Beijing would use its economic clout to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

But on Saturday, Trump said on Twitter that he was “very disappointed in China” which he said profits from trade with the United States but does “NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk. We will no longer allow this to continue,” he said.

 

DIRECT RESPONSE

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un personally supervised the midnight test launch of the missile on Friday night and said it was a “stern warning” for the United States that it would not be safe from destruction if it tries to attack, the North’s official KCNA news agency said.

North Korea’s state television broadcast pictures of the launch, showing the missile lifting off in a fiery blast in darkness and Kim cheering with military aides.

The missile test came a day after the U.S. Senate approved a package of sanctions against North Korea, Russia and Iran.

The B-1B flight was a response to the missile test and the July 3 launch of the “Hwasong-14” rocket, the Pentagon said. The bombers took off from a U.S. air base in Guam, and were joined by Japanese and South Korean fighter jets during the exercise, according to the statement.

“North Korea remains the most urgent threat to regional stability,” Pacific Air Forces commander General Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy said in a statement.

“If called upon, we are ready to respond with rapid, lethal, and overwhelming force at a time and place of our choosing.”

Also on Sunday, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency announced the United States had successfully shot down a medium-range missile in the latest test of its THAAD missile defense program which is designed to protect the country against potential threats from countries such as North Korea and Iran.

The test was planned well before the rising tensions with North Korea and involved a medium-range missile, not the long-range types being tested by the North Koreans.

 

FAR REACH

The Hwasong-14, named after the Korean word for Mars, reached an altitude of 3,724.9 km (2,314.6 miles) and flew 998 km (620 miles)for 47 minutes and 12 seconds before landing in the waters off the Korean peninsula’s east coast, KCNA said.

Western experts said calculations based on that flight data and estimates from the U.S., Japanese and South Korean militaries showed the missile could have been capable of going as far into the United States as Denver and Chicago.

David Wright of the U.S.-based Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in a blog post that if it had flown on a standard trajectory, the missile would have had a range of 10,400 km (6,500 miles).

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a leading Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said she saw the test as “a clear and present danger to the United States.”

“I think the only solution is a diplomatic one. I’m very disappointed in China’s response, that it has not been firmer or more helpful,” Feinstein told CBS television’s “Face the Nation,” urging the administration to begin talks with the North.

U.S. intelligence officials assess that even if North Korea does develop a reliable, nuclear-capable ICBM, which some say it remains several steps short of doing, the weapon would be almost useless except to deter the conventional attacks that Kim fears.

Intelligence experts have concluded that Kim will not abandon his pursuit of a deliverable nuclear weapon.

“Kim is determined to secure international recognition of the North as a nuclear armed state, for the purposes of security, prestige, and political legitimacy,” says the National Intelligence Council’s January Global Trends report.

 

(Additional reporting by Sarah N. Lynch, Susan Cornwell, John Walcott and Roberta Rampton in Washington; Editing by Sam Holmes and Phil Berlowitz)