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Boxed In by Trump, Kim Jong Un Buys Time With Nod to 2020

Kim Jong Un may not be giving up on Donald Trump, but he’s ready to test the U.S. president’s patience.

Boxed In by Trump, Kim Jong Un Buys Time With Nod to 2020
Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader. (Photographer: Jorge Silva/Pool via Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- Kim Jong Un may not be giving up on Donald Trump, but he’s ready to test the U.S. president’s patience.

That was Kim’s message through a whirlwind series of events in the run up to Monday’s holiday marking his late grandfather Kim Il Sung’s birth. In his most extensive comments so far on his failed February summit with Trump, Kim expressed a willingness to meet again, but only if the U.S. accepted different terms in negotiations over his nuclear weapons.

Here’s what we learned about Kim’s strategy:

1. Kim thinks he can wait Trump out

Kim has faced the same choice for more than a year: Talk with Trump or force a crisis by resuming weapons tests. After failing to get sanctions relief at the U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi, he’s picked another option: Wait.

Kim said in an address to the rubber-stamp Supreme People’s Assembly that he would “wait for a bold decision from the U.S. with patience till the end of this year,” according to the official Korean Central News Agency. Besides avoiding blame for scuttling talks, it potentially puts the issue back in the spotlight just as Trump prepares to run for re-election in 2020.

“He’s not going to be the first one to walk away from diplomacy,” said Duyeon Kim, an adjunct senior fellow in Seoul for the Center for a New American Society. “He has put the ball in Washington’s court and is seeking it to be more flexible.”

The U.S. is ready to keep the talks going. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday at an event in Texas that, “Trump is determined to move forward diplomatically,” and “this is the outcome we’re looking for.”

Boxed In by Trump, Kim Jong Un Buys Time With Nod to 2020

2. Kim really wants Trump to ease sanctions

Kim Jong Un was ready to grant Trump praise -- mentioning him by name and noting they “still maintain good relations.” But he’s clearly frustrated with the president’s support for maintaining sanctions, bemoaning the U.S.’s “completely unrealizable methods” and what he said in his speech to parliament was a lack of “definite orientation or methodology” at the Hanoi summit.

“By that sort of thinking, the United States will not be able to move us one iota nor get what it wants at all, even if it sits with us a hundred times, a thousand times,” Kim said. The North Korean leader repeatedly complained about “sanctions by the hostile forces” and cited a recent U.S. anti-ballistic missile as evidence of lingering animosity in Washington.

“Kim is paying a lot of attention to the sanctions and that could mean that the sanctions are really biting,” said Chun Yungwoo, South Korea’s former chief envoy to international nuclear negotiations with North Korea. “But the North Koreans are not going to surrender to the terms and conditions that President Trump has laid out up to this point.”

3. Kim isn’t preparing North Koreans for disarmament

“Denuclearization” wasn’t among the more than 2,800 words in the English version of the state media report on Kim’s speech. Rather he credited the country’s “rapidly developing nuclear armed forces” with making the U.S. concerned about its own safety and bringing it to the negotiating table.

While the remarks could be viewed as an attempt to maintain morale among his domestic audience, they’re not the sort of thing Kim would say if he was preparing the country to give up its arsenal. In fact, he alluded to his previous order to mass produce nuclear weapons, saying “we should hold fast to the principle of self-reliant defense and keep building up the country’s defense capability.”

The remark underscores the main risk for the U.S. in letting Kim run out the clock. It gives North Korea more time to perfect the technology needed to mount a nuclear warhead on a missile and deliver it to a target in the U.S.

On Sunday, Kim bolstered his support in the military by promoting dozens of generals ahead of his grandfather’s birthday.

4. Kim is girding for a slog under sanctions

Waiting isn’t without danger for Kim, too, whose economy is being squeezed by international sanctions that restrict everything from how much energy North Korea can import to its purchase of personal computers. That economic hardship is a potential source of dissent against his regime’s about 70-year rule.

Nonetheless, Kim has in recent days repeatedly appealed to the country to “strike a blow” against its enemies by resisting the blockade. “Whatever wind may blow and whatever challenges and difficulties may lie ahead, our republic will, in the future, too, make no concession or compromise over the issues concerning the fundamental interests of our state and people,” Kim said.

At the same time, he made changes in leadership personnel and replaced some of the elderly officials from his father’s generations with younger officials in a possible move to consolidate power before the “protracted” battle. Kim replaced 91-year-old Kim Yong Nam, who had served North Korea’s two previous rulers, with Choe Ryong Hae as president of the assembly’s presidium, the country’s nominal head of state.

5. Kim intends to keep pressuring South Korea

Kim reserved some of his most pointed criticism for South Korea, in a warning to President Moon Jae-in in Seoul. Moon, who met with Trump at the White House on Thursday, has staked much of presidency on trying to find common ground between his allies in Washington and the country’s traditional rivals in Pyongyang.

In his speech to the assembly, Kim called on the South Korean to quit acting as an “officious mediator” or “facilitator.” A separate KCNA commentary published Saturday also cited South Korea’s continued participation in joint military drills with the U.S. and its deployment of two American-made F-35A stealth fighters to argue that Moon’s government was “reneging on its promise” to reduce military tensions.

The remarks challenged Moon’s assertion that his country’s ties with North Korea shouldn’t outpace the improvement in relations between Pyongyang and Washington. The South Korean leader told top ministers on Monday that they should seek another meeting with Kim. Moon said he was ready to “sit down together regardless of venue and form.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Youkyung Lee in Seoul at ylee582@bloomberg.net;Jon Herskovitz in Tokyo at jherskovitz@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at bscott66@bloomberg.net, Chris Kay

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.