Trump eases tone on N Korea with S’pore summit back on

Bloomberg

President Donald Trump conceded that North Korea won’t agree to immediately give up its nuclear weapons as he confirmed his June 12 summit with Kim Jong Un will go ahead.
In a scene that would have been difficult to imagine even a few months ago, Trump walked former North Korean spy chief Kim Yong Chol to his black SUV after meeting for more than an hour in the Oval Office on Friday. The two men posed for photos and waved goodbye before the US president turned to the media to say he would go to Singapore for talks he had backed out of just a week ago.
But the tone and goals for that historic summit now seemed more measured. Of possible achievements from the talks, Trump said, “We will see what we will see.” And on the US goal of securing immediate denuclearisation: “I think it’s going to be a process. But the relationships are building, and that’s a great positive.”
Gone was the rhetoric from last year, when Trump referred to Kim as a “Rocket Man” on a “suicide mission.” He didn’t mention the US demand that North Korea give up its nuclear program. Asked about the vaunted “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions enacted to rein in North Korea, Trump said “I don’t want to use that term. Because we’re getting along.”
The US has previously insisted that North Korea give up all its weapons before it can shed its pariah status or get any relief from sanctions.
North Korea has bristled at the idea, and it’s not at all clear the two sides will be able to bridge their differences enough for the meeting to be deemed a success. “He’s really walking back the high expectations” for the summit, said Sue Mi Terry, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Of Trump’s attitude toward Kim, she said: “He thinks he will be able to charm him into giving up his nuclear weapons programme.”
Trump’s talk of an open-ended process is a jarring shift from the speedy outcome that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other officials demanded when the summit was in limbo. Trump didn’t say what he hopes to get out of the summit, nor did he talk about what the US was prepared to give up, aside from musing about the possibility of a declaration ending the Korean War for good.