SEOUL, South Korea (AP) South Koreans, always deeply divided over how best to deal with their often belligerent northern neighbor, are reacting with both hope and wariness to U.S. President Donald Trumps announcement that he will hold a second nuclear disarmament summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Feb. 27-28 in Vietnam.
But for liberal South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who is eager to push ahead with ambitious plans for engagement with North Korea, a breakthrough in Vietnam is crucial. Moon served as diplomatic middleman between the U.S. and North Korea following the Norths increasingly powerful string of weapons tests and Trumps threats of military action in 2017.
The Trump administration last week signaled that it would defer some of its most stringent demands on North Korea. Stephen Biegun, the State Departments special representative for North Korea, indicated in a speech today that the U.S. is no longer insisting Pyongyang provide a detailed accounting of its nuclear and missile programs at the start of the denuclearization process but can do so later in the talks.
The U.S. is prepared to take steps to ease sanctions and settle longstanding disagreements simultaneously and in parallel with moves by Pyongyang to constrain and ultimately eliminate its nuclear arsenal, Biegun said. Until the speech, the U.S. had insisted the elimination of North Koreas weapons must come first.
A year of mostly fruitless diplomacy has led to serious doubts about Kims sincerity and Trumps ability to force North Korea to significantly reduce the threat its nuclear weapons pose to the region and world.
Denuclearization will be difficult because North Korea wants to keep nuclear weapons, and the United States wants them all gone, Lee Sang-won, a 68-year-old retiree, said Thursday at a bustling Seoul train station.
Trump announced Vietnam as the summit venue during his State of the Union address on Wednesday, as millions of South Koreans made visits to their hometowns during Lunar New Year holidays.
On Thursday, Trumps special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, held a second day of talks with officials in Pyongyang, North Koreas capital, to hammer out summit logistics and an agenda. Biegun is expected to come to South Korea to brief officials as early as Friday. Moons office said Wednesday that Seoul hopes Trump and Kim will make concrete and substantial progress in their talks in Vietnam, but few other details were released.
At Seoul Station, broadcasts of Trumps summit announcement drew crowds in front of large TV screens. Trump, Kim and nuclear weapons were also likely subjects of heated political discussions at holiday dinner tables across the country. South Korea is split along generational and ideological lines on how to handle the North.
A wave of optimism greeted the diplomatic developments of 2018, which included three summits between Kim and Moon as well as the first Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, but South Koreans may have become much more skeptical in recent months. In a December poll of some 1,000 people by Gallup Korea, 45 percent of respondents said they do not believe Kim will keep his denuclearization promises, compared to 38 percent who said they trust Kim. The margin of error was 3.1 percentage points.
Despite the hype of Trumps first meeting with Kim, the highly orchestrated one-day meeting in Singapore only produced a vague aspirational vow about a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula without describing when and how it would occur.
North Korea has since insisted that U.S.-led sanctions against the country should be lifted before theres any progress in nuclear negotiations, and Kim has yet to convincingly show that hell voluntarily relinquish an arsenal he may see as his strongest guarantee of survival.
As skepticism mounts, the South Korean president wants to maintain an impression that things are moving toward North Korean denuclearization. Moon is trying to keep Washington hard-liners at bay and create more space for inter-Korean reconciliation, which he says is crucial for resolving the nuclear standoff.
The Koreas in past months have discussed reconnecting railways and roads across their border, resuming operations at a jointly run factory park in the North Korean border town of Kaesong and restarting South Korean tours to the Norths Diamond Mountain resort.
But tough sanctions have limited what they can do, with Washington insisting on keeping up economic pressure until North Korea takes stronger steps toward irreversibly and verifiably relinquishing its nuclear weapons.
