Kim Jong Un on Friday became the first North Korean ruler to cross the border into South Korean territory since 1953 as he met with President Moon Jae-in. The one-day bilateral summit is the third ever meeting between leaders of the two Koreas, but wasn’t clear whether denuclearization would be on the agenda.
Following years of Pyongyang’s repeated nuclear tests and missile launches, the face-to-face meeting has been heralded as a diplomatic win. But rather than broach the nitty-gritty details of the North’s nuclear program, Moon is widely expected to play nice and use Friday’s summit to establish trust.
The event’s real purpose, according to many strategists, is to set the stage for Kim’s meeting with President Donald Trump slated for May or June.
Moon’s primary goals are generating domestic public support for a warmer relationship with the North and normalizing peninsular dialogue for the future, Scott Snyder, senior fellow for Korea Studies and director of the U.S.-Korea Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a note.
Writing in the guest book of South Korea’s Peace House in the demilitarized zone that separates the two countries, Kim wrote “a new history starts now.”
“The success metric for [Friday] should be the establishment of trust, number one. And, number two, a broad-based agenda,” said Jasper Kim, director of the center for global conflict management at Seoul’s Ewha University.
The South and North Korean leaders come from culturally similar backgrounds, so their communication style is more non-linear, the professor continued. They may talk about all sorts of topics that may not make sense to Western audiences, but those discussions are really all wrapped around the issue of trust, he said.
The two are expected to sign a joint agreement at the close of Friday. Close attention will be paid to wording and potential promises Kim may make regarding matters of inter-Korean cooperation, such as family reunions, as well as nuclear policy.
“What we’re looking for is a broad-based announcement after [Friday’s] talks … It’s kind of going to be like a very short-term sheet,” said the Ewha University professor. That agreement could then be taken to the next level at the Trump-Kim summit, where details on denuclearization will be discussed, he continued.
But that’s not to say Moon, who has been criticized for being too accommodative to Pyongyang, wouldn’t press Kim at all.
Seoul “is under some pressure because Donald Trump has been stressing, with the likes of John Bolton, to get results quickly out of this summit process,” said Chad O’Carroll, managing director of Korea Risk Group.
“Compared to previous summits where there would have been a lot more discussion on incremental steps, Moon will be coming in from the position that the U.S. needs to see some very clear progress on denuclearization,” O’Carroll added.
Pyongyang is also aware of those dynamics, so “there may be potential for surprises that analysts may not have expected from the North Korean side,” he concluded.
“North Korea has traditionally reserved denuclearization as an issue to be exclusively broached with the United States,” said Snyder. “This means that South Korea can support dialogue on denuclearization with North Korea but can never lead such a dialogue. It also means that if Moon achieves an inter-Korean summit but is unable to set the stage for a Trump-Kim summit, his efforts to reach out to North Korea will have been foiled.”
Hammering out such a complex issue in one summit, especially details such as reaching a definition of “denuclearization” that’s accepted by all players and figuring out how to verify it, remains infeasible, many have warned.
Trump, on Tuesday, specifically defined denuclearization as Pyongyong getting rid of its deadly weapons. The reclusive state, however, has insisted over the years that it may agree to do so only if Washington fulfills certain conditions, such as terminating its military presence in South Korea.
Kim is unlikely to tell Moon or Trump he’s ready to dismantle nuclear weapons, said Thomas Hubbard, a former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, who was the principal negotiator of a 1994 deal aimed at ending the North’s weapons program.
Such summits are instead aimed at starting a process that will eventually lead to that direction, Hubbard stated.
