Trump agrees to second Kim summit as N-deal stays elusive

Bloomberg

US President Donald Trump agreed to hold a second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the end of February. What the two leaders hope to achieve remains a mystery.
The summit announcement came after a 90-minute White House meeting between Trump and Kim Yong Chol, one of the North Korean leader’s top aides. They discussed “denucleariaation and a second summit,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.
State Department spokesman Robert Palladino said talks between Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and the visiting envoy were “good.”
Neither the administration nor the North Koreans offered much else about what they had agreed to and what would be gained from the planned summit. That only raised more questions because so little progress has been made towards the US’s ultimate goal — getting North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons — since the first meeting between Trump and Kim in Singapore in June.
Attention turned to Stockholm, with North Korea’s top envoy Choe Son Hui and her South Korean counterpart, Lee Do-hoon, both expected to be in town. The State Department said the US’s special representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, would also attend an international conference in Sweden, but stopped short of saying whether he would secure his first meeting with Choe.
“I don’t think we have any concrete agreement,” said Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA analyst who’s now at the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington. “Obviously Kim doesn’t want to meet with the bureaucrats who would make him agree to something, and I think Trump would welcome the distraction right now.”
The talks offered Trump a departure from the partisan stalemate over the US government shutdown and the continued drip of investigations into his Russia dealings.
The president’s approval ratings have rarely been as high as they were in the aftermath of the first summit, when he declared North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat.
More than seven months later, North Korea has made no commitments to allow weapons inspections or dismantle its growing arsenal of warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The announcement suggested that the US was softening its refusal to relax sanctions against North Korea, since Kim had earlier this month threatened to walk away from talks if Trump didn’t compromise.
“The Trump-Kim Yong Chol meeting is arguably an indication that the US president has deprioritised the goal of complete denuclearisation of North Korea for the sake of another mega-diplomatic event with Kim Jong-un, when there is no positive sign from Pyongyang that it will ever commit to a denuclearisation process,” said Go Myong-Hyun, a research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul.
The schedule leaves little time for negotiators to craft a detailed agreement, especially while the shutdown hampers bureaucratic work in Washington. The security concerns of both leaders make the choice of venue particularly sensitive.