‘Trump must adopt patience with N Korea’

Bloomberg

President Donald Trump will need to adopt an unfamiliar set of traits — patience, persistence, clear goals and conditions — and be prepared to walk away when he meets North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, people who have negotiated with Kim’s regime say.
Trump’s apparently impromptu decision to begin setting up talks contrasts with Kim’s situation — North Korea has prepared deliberately for decades for a meeting with the sitting US president as a major step towards gaining international legitimacy.
Negotiations with the North Korean regime are “very painstaking and, frankly, painful,” said Christopher Hill, who served as US ambassador to South Korea and assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush. “You think you have an agreement one minute and then you don’t the next minute.”
The White House said that Trump plans to meet with Kim within months, dispensing with decades of American foreign policy by accepting a high-stakes invitation from the North Korean leader. The summit, which the Trump administration hopes will lead to talks to wind down Kim’s nuclear weapons program, could avert what has at times seemed to be an imminent war on the Korean Peninsula. But the meeting may also be a ploy by Kim to buy time to perfect his weapons and wriggle out of punishing economic sanctions.

KIM MYSTERY
Add to that the mystery of Kim himself, who is not known to have met with another head of state since taking charge. The South Korean government’s analysis of the dictator may help, Hill said. “Beyond that, we only have Dennis Rodman to go on.”
It might not hurt Trump to have a chat with Rodman, his one-time “Celebrity Apprentice” contestant, who has probably met the North Korean dictator more than any other American.
The White House demonstrated its own capacity to complicate the situation. In a Twitter post, Trump wrote that “the deal with North Korea is very much in the making and will be, if completed, a very good one for the World. Time and place to be determined.”
‘NIXON IN CHINA’
Should it materialise, “Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un will be flashy and spectacular and will be Trump’s footnote in history, his Nixon in China moment,” said Gary Samore, who negotiated with North Korea during the Clinton administration and served as President Barack Obama’s arms-control coordinator. “But whether it leads to a real agreement I think is very unclear
at this point.”
A senior State Department official said the administration’s expectation is that the talks will determine whether the two sides are ready for broader negotiations on the North’s nuclear program and security issues.
“They’ve always said they’ll give up their nuclear program if the threat from the United States is removed, so their position hasn’t changed in three decades,” Samore said. “The catch, of course, is what it would take to remove the threat is very elastic and very extensive.”
Hill said that Trump would be well served to reject the idea of a “free-form” discussion and instead enter the talks with a structure and a clear understanding of variables such as when denuclearization would happen. “Otherwise he will possibly come out of the meeting not knowing what’s been agreed to.”

RICE, BABY FORMULA
Samore said the North Koreans “will be incredibly gracious and friendly. They have no interest in embarrassing Trump. They’ll be extremely polite, respectful, friendly because for them the payoff is the photo-op of Kim Jong Un shaking hands with the president of the United States and giving Kim Jong Un status and stature.”
But substantial negotiations will likely prove frustrating. When he negotiated with Kim’s father’s regime, Samore said, North Korea demanded tangible goods — rice or baby formula, for example — without offering much in the way of concessions. “Whatever we wanted, they would say, ‘a million tons of rice.’”
“Clinton, Bush and Obama all discovered that this is not an easy problem to solve and so I’m afraid Trump is going into this with wildly erratic expectations,” he said.

No new conditions for Trump-Kim meeting
Bloomberg

The White House hasn’t added conditions for proposed talks between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un beyond requiring the regime to cease missile and nuclear-weapon testing, an administration official said. Press Secr- etary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the regime must first undertake unspecified “concrete and verifiable actions.” The remarks appeared to add conditions to a meeting first announced.
She also declined to confirm that Trump aimed to meet with Kim by May, as a South Korean envoy had said at the White House. “We’re not going to have this meeting take place until we see concrete actions that match the words and the rhetoric of North Korea,” Sanders said in a briefing with reporters.
Subsequently, an administration official said the White House expects Kim to stick to promises — conveyed through South Korean
envoys — that he would cease weapons tests before the summit and that he’s open to discussing denuclearization. The official declined to be identified discussing the White House’s planning for the meeting.
Sanders said that the North Koreans had “promised to denuclearize, they have promised to stop nuclear and missile testing, and they’ve recognized that we’re going to continue in our military exercises.”