President Trump remains bullish that the North Korea nuclear threat can be contained. Speaking to reporters on Saturday, the president praised the incredible meeting he had the day before with a top representative of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, trumpeting the tremendous progress the two sides had made.
The optimistic view is that the White House meeting with Kim Yong-chol, a former North Korean intelligence chief and now his governments lead nuclear negotiator, was indeed productive, and Mr. Trump is on his way to resolving one of the worlds most complex and dangerous nuclear weapons problems.
But a path to that outcome isnt yet visible to the outside world. North Korea has forgone nuclear tests, missile tests and rhetorical attacks for more than 400 days. Thats an important development. At the same time, however, it continues to produce nuclear fuel, weapons and missiles. It has not denuclearized, as Mr. Trump has demanded.
So, as the two leaders prepare for their second summit (reportedly next month in Vietnam), the pressure is on the Trump administration to articulate a realistic strategy for achieving a mutually agreed upon outcome.
No such strategy was evident last June when Mr. Trump broke with decades of foreign policy precedent by meeting directly with Mr. Kim in Singapore, in the first summit between American and North Korean leaders. Mr. Trump deserves credit for opening up this dialogue, but it has, so far, yielded few tangible results.
After that meeting, Mr. Trump declared that North Korea, which possesses 20 to 60 nuclear weapons, the missiles to deliver them and the facilities to make even more, was no longer a nuclear threat. Saying so didnt make it so.
The one concrete product of the Singapore meeting, a concluding statement, was so poorly drafted that it laid the groundwork for months of stalemate. It committed the two leaders to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, without even defining denuclearization, let alone explicitly agreeing on the sequence of actions to be taken.
A new report this week about a previously secret North Korean missile base at Sino-ri, 132 miles north of the Demilitarized Zone, is a reminder of how sprawling and hidden the countrys nuclear program is and how challenging any sort of outside inspections regime might be to carry out.
Publicly, the two sides still hew to staunch positions: The Trump administration insists that tough sanctions will stay in place until North Korea completely gives up its nuclear arsenal. North Korean officials insist on sanctions relief early in the process.
But small signs of movement led to plans for the second summit. Mr. Trump backed off his insistence on immediate disarmament, and his administration recently eased travel restrictions so American aid workers and humanitarian supplies could once again enter the impoverished country.
Mr. Kims annual New Years Day speech presented a somewhat more positive view of United States-North Korea relations, an encouraging sign.
Even if complete denuclearization is not possible, negotiators should at least seek a permanent end to testing and the production of fissile material.
The New York Times
