nuclear-news

Trump and Kim’s Cozy Relationship Makes Nuclear Talks Tougher

Since the breakup of the most recent round of talks in Hanoi in February, however, Kim has registered his displeasure not as a lover scorned, but as a dictator at the helm of an increasingly advanced nuclear arsenal. Over one week in May, he personally oversaw the trials of at least two short-range ballistic missiles capable of striking all of South Korea, where some 28,500 U.S. troops are based.

The back-to-back launches broke an almost 17-month pause in major weapons testing and likely violated United Nations resolutions banning North Korea from firing ballistic missiles—but crucially, it didn’t violate Kim’s pledge to Trump to halt testing of long-range missiles that could strike the continental U.S. The act was both aggressive and subtle, showing the U.S. that North Korea was willing to play ball but refused to be played.

In securing the unprecedented meeting with Trump and entering direct negotiations with the U.S. president, Kim left himself few options if the conversations were to go poorly. The U.S. has been in a similar position since Trump tweeted just after the Singapore meeting that North Korea was “no longer a nuclear threat.” Both leaders must now walk a delicate line to save face and avoid what neither of them wants: nuclear war.

Kim’s primary goal going into the Hanoi summit was considerably more mundane. He was seeking to make North Korea a normal country in the eyes of the world and to remove sanctions that are crushing the economy and stoking popular unrest. According to the UN, its 2018 harvest was the worst in a decade, leaving 40 percent of the population in need of food assistance.

…….. Current South Korean President Moon Jae-in is caught between the two leaders. Seoul is within the range of both missiles fired in early May, and Moon doesn’t want to disrupt his own fragile relationship with Kim by appearing to side with Trump. In his speech, Kim urged Moon to stop being an “officious mediator,” using a Korean slang term—ojirap—that’s rarely used by public figures in official settings and almost never by a younger person referring to an elder. The South Korean government “must defend the interest of the nation,” Kim said.

Moon helped broker the first summit between Trump and Kim, in a pair of dramatic meetings with the North Korean leader on the Koreas’ militarized border, and is now pushing for a third by appealing to common human decency.  ……

The second missile test, on May 9, occurred while Trump’s top nuclear envoy, Stephen Biegun, was in Seoul to meet with South Korean officials. There’s been no indication that the U.S. is willing to accept what many North Korea watchers agree is Kim’s true goal: admission into the exclusive club of accepted nuclear-armed states. ………. The more time passes, the more sophisticated Kim’s arsenal becomes, shrinking Trump’s margin of error in responding to threats and increasing the danger of miscalculation. There’s also the risk that Trump and Kim learn they’re not as close as they thought they were. …. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-20/trump-and-kim-got-too-serious-too-fast-in-nuclear-discussions