Trump sees 'tremendous progress' on the Koreas where none exists - WaPo Editorial Board
By Editorial Board
September 22 at 6:07 PM
A THREE-day summit meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea this week produced some significant steps to reduce tensions and the risk of war along the two countries’ borders, as well as plans for new economic cooperation. But it offered no real progress in the matter of most import to the United States: the dismantlement of North Korea’s arsenal of nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles capable of striking the United States. Instead, it appeared to raise the risk of a breach between the Trump administration and the dovish South Korean government of Moon Jae-in, which is pushing for significant U.S. concessions even without meaningful action by the Kim Jong Un regime.
That President Trump would describe this result as “tremendous progress ” and “very exciting” only makes it more disturbing. Intent on portraying his Korean diplomacy as a success, Mr. Trump appears to be ignoring — or maybe failing to understand — all-too-palpable warning signs.
The administration set the goal of a “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” of North Korea. But the third Moon-Kim summit meeting, like that between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump in June, passed without any unambiguous commitment by North Korea to that end. Instead, Mr. Kim spoke of a “Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons and nuclear threat,” a formulation that Pyongyang has long defined as including the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea and the removal of the U.S. nuclear umbrella from both South Korea and Japan.
Mr. Trump’s negotiators have been pushing the North for a show of seriousness about negotiating denuclearization, such as a full disclosure of its arsenal and facilities. Instead, Mr. Kim this week offered the same mostly symbolic measure he outlined to Mr. Trump months ago: the dismantlement of a single engine test site and missile launchpad.
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