Trump says North Korean summit scheduled for June may not happen

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U.S. President Donald Trump is warning that his planned meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un may be cancelled or postponed, and appears to be placing the blame on China.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in rushed to Washington Tuesday in a bid to keep the summit on track, which would be the first between a sitting American president and a North Korean leader. The meeting is scheduled for June 12 in Singapore.

“There’s a very substantial chance that it won’t work out, and that’s okay,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office, sitting next to Mr. Moon. “That doesn’t mean it won’t work out over a period of time. But it may not work out for June 12th. But there’s a good chance that we’ll have the meeting.”

After a period of relative calm between Washington and Pyongyang – during which Mr. Trump even mused openly that he would win the Nobel Peace Prize for successfully getting North Korea to give up its arsenal – the summit has suddenly found itself on thin ice over the past week. The trouble appears to be confusion between the two sides over what the meeting is meant to achieve.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump further ratcheted up the tension, saying that Mr. Kim had become cooler to the idea of the summit after meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this month. China is North Korea’s chief trading partner, and Mr. Trump has long leaned on Mr. Xi to rein in his renegade ally. Mr. Xi met with Mr. Kim for the second time earlier this month in the northern Chinese city of Dalian.

“There was a somewhat different attitude after that meeting, and I’m a little surprised … maybe nothing happened and maybe it did,” Mr. Trump said. “I can’t say that I’m happy about it. Okay?”

Mr. Trump did not specify why, exactly, he believed Mr. Xi had interfered with the summit plans. The United States is currently locked in trade negotiations with China, where it is demanding Beijing buy more American goods to help erase the United States’ trade deficit and stop forcing foreign companies to turn over trade secrets.

The U.S. President spontaneously agreed to the meeting with Mr. Kim in March, after South Korean officials mentioned to him that the North Korean leader wanted to discuss denuclearization.

Last week, North Korea threatened to cancel the meeting after Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, said Washington is looking for Pyongyang to follow the example of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who ended his nuclear weapons program in 2004 in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Mr. Gadhafi was later overthrown by rebel forces with U.S. help. North Korea also complained about joint American-South Korean military exercises.

Jon Wolfsthal, former president Barack Obama’s top adviser on nuclear non-proliferation, said the problem is that Mr. Trump agreed to meet Mr. Kim without understanding what the goal of the summit would actually be: The U.S. President thought the meeting would lead to North Korea immediately disarming, rather than simply kick-starting a long-term process with the eventual goal of denuclearization.

“It’s clear that South Korea and the United States have not listened to each other and understood each other, and I think that’s the fault of the United States. Trump didn’t even take the time to try and understand,” said Mr. Wolfsthal, who now works for Global Zero, an anti-nuclear weapons group. “Now, President Trump is surprised that North Korea is not willing to turn over all of its weapons on day one.”

Mr. Moon’s objective, Mr. Wolfsthal said, is to make sure Mr. Trump understands what the summit could realistically achieve and see if the U.S. President is willing to commit to such a longer-term negotiation.

What’s more, the two sides did not agree on exactly what “denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula, the goal of the talks, would mean before Mr. Trump accepted the meeting invitation. Pyongyang sees denuclearization as a two-way street.

“They see something which is phased, and which would affect our behaviour also, in terms of whether we have a nuclear umbrella for our allies, like South Korea and Japan,” Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state who led previous talks in 2000 aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear program, told The Globe last month.

Mr. Moon, for his part, tried to convince Mr. Trump that a meeting was worth having. The South Korean President has tried frantically to defuse tensions since Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim traded insults last summer, when Mr. Trump taunted Mr. Kim as “Little Rocket Man” on Twitter and Mr. Kim called Mr. Trump “mentally deranged” and threatened to bring him to heel “with fire.”

“I have every confidence that President Trump will be able to achieve a historic feat of making the upcoming U.S.-North Korea summit successful,” Mr. Moon said.

Also mysterious amid the mounting tensions are the exactly motivations of Mr. Kim: whether he was genuinely surprised to discover that he and Mr. Trump had different goals for the summit, or whether he is deliberately stirring the pot in a bid to drive a wedge between the United States and its South Korean allies.

Carla Robbins, a national security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Mr. Kim’s cancellation threats are less puzzling than him agreeing to denuclearization talks in the first place.

“I have been awed that this didn’t happen sooner. I’ve been puzzled at why Kim would use the term ‘denuclearization,’ ” she said in an interview. “This is not a surprise – this is reverting to type for the North Koreans.”