:ALERTRED:
Trump impulsively just may have gotten baited by the North Koreans.
Trump impulsively just may have gotten baited by the North Koreans.
Trump’s Abrupt ‘Yes’ to North Korea: The 45 Minutes That Could Alter History
By PETER BAKER and CHOE SANG-HUNMARCH 10, 2018
President Trump with Chung Eui-yong, the South Korean national security adviser, at the White House on Thursday. South Korean Presidential Office
WASHINGTON — Summoned to the Oval Office on the spur of the moment, the South Korean envoy found himself face to face with President Trump one afternoon last week at what he thought might be a hinge moment in history.
Chung Eui-yong had come to the White House bearing an invitation. But he opened with flattery, which diplomats have discovered is a key to approaching the volatile American leader. “We could come this far thanks to a great degree to President Trump,” Mr. Chung said. “We highly appreciate this fact.”
Then he got to the point: The United States, South Korea and their allies should not repeat their “past mistakes,” but South Korea believed that North Korea’s mercurial leader, Kim Jong-un, was “frank and sincere” when he said he wanted to talk with the Americans about giving up his nuclear program. Mr. Kim, he added, had told the South Koreans that if Mr. Trump would join him in an unprecedented summit meeting, the two could produce a historic breakthrough.
Mr. Trump accepted on the spot, stunning not only Mr. Chung and the other high-level South Koreans who were with him, but also the phalanx of American officials who were gathered in the Oval Office.:weebaynanimated:
His advisers had assumed the president would take more time to discuss such a decision with them first.:hovlaugh: Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the president’s national security adviser, both expressed caution. If you go ahead with this, they told Mr. Trump, there will be risks and downsides.
Mr. Trump brushed them off. I get it, I get it, he said.:shakingdamn:
Where others see flashing yellow lights and slow down, Mr. Trump speeds up. And just like that, in the course of 45 minutes in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump threw aside caution and dispensed with decades of convention to embark on a daring, high-wire diplomatic gambit aimed at resolving one of the world’s most intractable standoffs.
The story of how this came about, assembled through interviews with officials and analysts from the United States, South Korea, Japan and China, is a case study in international relations in the Trump era. A president with no prior foreign policy experience takes on a festering conflict that has vexed the world for years with a blend of impulse and improvisation, and with no certain outcome. One moment, he is hurling playground insults and threatening nuclear war, the next he is offering the validation of a presidential meeting.
Whether the high-stakes gamble ultimately pays off, no one can know. Given two unpredictable and highly combustible leaders, it seems just as likely that the meeting will never take place. If it does occur, the challenges are so steep, the gulf so wide and the history so fraught with misunderstanding, suspicion and broken promises that the prospect of an enduring resolution to the impasse seems remote.
But Mr. Trump has staked his reputation as a deal maker on the presumption that he can personally achieve what no other president has before him.
A Thorny Road
The path to a possible meeting led through a thicket of hostility and feints.
Throughout his first year in office, Mr. Trump ratcheted up economic sanctions while rattling his nuclear saber at “Little Rocket Man” and threatening to “totally destroy North Korea.”
Mr. Kim could match the president he called “the mentally deranged U.S. dotard” bombast for bombast. In a New Year’s Day speech, he said he had “a nuclear button on the desk” that could launch missiles capable of reaching the United States. Mr. Trump responded with a tweet saying that “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his.”
But South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, focused on the other part of Mr. Kim’s speech, when he declared that he would send athletes to the Winter Olympics, which would be held the next month in South Korea. A flurry of negotiations ensued at Panmunjom, the “truce village” inside the Korean demilitarized zone, that, by the standards of inter-Korean talks, went unusually well.
At the Winter Olympics in South Korea, Vice President Mike Pence made a point of refusing to greet Kim Yo-jong, the sister of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
For the opening ceremony, on Feb. 9, Mr. Kim sent his sister, Kim Yo-jong, while Mr. Trump sent Vice President Mike Pence. The vice president was told of a possible meeting with North Korean officials at the Games if he would tone down his message, not talk about sanctions, not meet with defectors and not bring along Fred Warmbier, whose son, Otto, an American student, died soon after being released from captivity in North Korea.
Mr. Pence opted to do all of those anyway to show resolve, and the North Koreans canceled the meeting at the last minute. Taking the hard-line position he believed the president wanted him to take, a grim-faced Mr. Pence refused to stand for the entry of the joint Korean team that included athletes from both North and South and made a point of refusing to greet Mr. Kim’s sister, who was just 10 feet away.
Mr. Pence’s failure to stand was taken as an insult to Mr. Moon and the South Korean public, undercutting the vice president’s intent to show solidarity with an ally. Mr. Moon had been determined to bring the Americans and North Koreans together, to the irritation of the American delegation, which believed that he was deliberately trying to stage-manage an encounter they considered awkward and inappropriate.
Mr. Moon, by contrast, hosted Ms. Kim for a lavish luncheon at the presidential Blue House, and she surprised him with a letter from her brother. She told Mr. Moon that her brother wanted to convene a summit meeting at an early date. The two spent nearly three hours together, with Mr. Moon doing most of the talking.
He said that he really wanted to meet Mr. Kim and improve ties, but that there was a limit to how far he could go without progress in dismantling the North’s nuclear program. He urged North Korea to talk to the Americans and said they needed to hurry so as not to lose the rare momentum from the spirit of the Olympics visits.
A Family Envoy
After the unfortunate optics from Mr. Pence’s visit and what some viewed as a missed opportunity, Mr. Trump sent his daughter, Ivanka Trump, to the closing ceremony of the Games. She had dinner with Mr. Moon at the Blue House and briefed him on new sanctions her father would impose on North Korea, then made a public statement to reporters reaffirming the American strategy of “maximum pressure.”
She then headed to Pyeongchang for the last two days of competition. Briefed by Mr. Pence’s staff, Ms. Trump and her team were “incredibly forceful,” as one official put it, in going over the seating plan for the box and the timing and sequencing of arrivals to avoid any surprises.
Ms. Trump proffered a smiling, more open image that went over better in South Korea. She stood for the South Korean athletes, who this time entered the stadium separately from their compatriots from the North, and posed for photographs with famous Korean pop stars. But she too made a point of sending a message; for her guest in the box, she brought Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, commander of American forces in South Korea.
When she attended a curling event, Ms. Trump’s team received word that the North Koreans were on their way in what the Americans thought was an effort to make a scene or prompt her to leave in an embarrassing spectacle. Ms. Trump decided to stay, and the North Koreans in the end did not come.
All Smiles in the North
With the Olympics over, it was time for Mr. Moon to make his move. Last week, he sent two trusted aides on a two-day trip to Pyongyang: Mr. Chung, his national security adviser, and Suh Hoon, his National Intelligence Service director. Flying north, they knew that they were meeting Mr. Kim but not when.
After landing in Pyongyang, they were taken to a riverside guesthouse where they found their rooms equipped with the internet and access to foreign television channels, including CNN. They could even surf South Korean websites, a rare privilege in the totalitarian state. As soon as they unpacked, Kim Yong-chol, a general who heads inter-Korean relations, showed up and said that they were meeting Mr. Kim that evening.
Black limousines took the South Koreans to Azalea Hall in the ruling Workers’ Party headquarters, Mr. Kim’s workplace. They found Mr. Kim and his sister waiting to greet them with broad smiles. Mr. Chung and Mr. Suh were the first South Koreans to set foot inside the party headquarters since the Korean War.
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