Trump-Kim Talks Must Overcome Long History of Failure: QuickTake

(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un preparing to meet face-to-face is a prospect that seemed unthinkable just a year ago, when the leaders of the U.S. and North Korea were exchanging insults and threats. Kim has since indicated he’s willing to consider relinquishing his nuclear arsenal, which has been a condition for U.S. talks under Trump and prior presidential administrations. But more than two decades of negotiations have always broken down, with each side accusing the other of reneging on various commitments.

1. When and where will Trump and Kim meet?

There’s no time or date yet, but Trump said the meeting could come by “early June or before.” The U.S. president says there are five potential sites under consideration, without elaborating. (Here’s a list of nine possibilities Bloomberg compiled.) Kim plans to meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on April 27 at a village along their heavily fortified border.

2. What do the two sides want?

Broadly speaking, the U.S. wants North Korea to get rid of its nuclear weapons, in no small part because Kim has directly threatened to use them to strike the U.S. mainland. North Korea wants a guarantee of its own security, with a South Korean newspaper reporting that Kim would seek a peace treaty. Kim told Chinese President Xi Jinping in March that denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula can occur if the U.S. and South Korea take “progressive and synchronous measures” -- signaling he may request sanctions relief and a removal of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.

3. Why does North Korea worry about its security?

The 1950s conflict between North Korea -- backed by China and the Soviet Union -- and U.S.-led forces supporting South Korea ended without a peace treaty. As such, the U.S. and North Korea are technically still at war. Kim, like his father and grandfather, views the U.S. -- which stations some 30,000 troops in South Korea and conducts drills with its military -- as an existential threat. Recent American military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have only reinforced his view that nuclear weapons are necessary to deter a U.S. invasion.

4. What might be the result of talks?

Diplomats have long talked about a grand bargain: In exchange for economic assistance and security guarantees, North Korea would give up its nuclear weapons in a way that could be verified by outsiders. But that process involves lots of little steps that could play out over years. At the summit, Trump and Kim could agree on a framework for negotiators to work out the details, possibly through restarting so-called six-party talks with China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. The pair might also announce some confidence-building measures, including the release of three American citizens currently being detained in North Korea or some of the Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s. Trump could also lay out a pathway for easing sanctions or drawing down the more than 25,000 troops stationed in South Korea if North Korea takes certain actions. The meeting itself could be billed as an accomplishment, especially for Kim, who will benefit from being seen on an equal playing field with a U.S. president.

5. What is meant by ‘denuclearization’?

That may be in the eye of the beholder. Marc Short, Trump’s legislative affairs director, said it’s North Korea "no longer having nuclear weapons that can be used in warfare against any of our allies." But North Korea has taken a broader view of denuclearization as applying to the entire Korean peninsula. The U.S. hasn’t stationed nuclear weapons in South Korea since 1992, but it does guarantee the safety of South Korea and Japan under its so-called nuclear umbrella. To Kim, denuclearization could well encompass the U.S. backtracking on that bedrock promise to its allies in Asia.

6. Has any country willingly given up its nuclear weapons?

South Africa is considered to be the only nation to have successfully built its own nuclear weapons, then abandoned them. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, some of its nuclear weaponry was left in former republics Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and all three -- eventually -- arranged for them to be eliminated or transferred to Russia. The leaders of Iraq and Libya -- Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi -- each agreed to cease nuclear development before it yielded viable weapons: a key reason Kim has been reluctant to give up his weapons.

7. How advanced are Kim’s weapons and missiles programs?

North Korea has detonated what it said was a hydrogen bomb capable of riding an intercontinental ballistic missile to big cities across the U.S. One study concluded Kim’s military had successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles. But the U.S. military said as recently as January that North Korea hasn’t demonstrated essential capabilities for a missile, including whether such a device could survive reentry into the atmosphere and hit a target accurately. In an address in December, Kim said his nation’s nuclear deterrent was “irreversible.”

8. Why did previous talks with North Korea fail?

A 1994 accord to freeze the nuclear program, reached under Democratic President Bill Clinton, collapsed in 2002 after Republican President George W. Bush took office and the U.S. accused North Korea of having a secret program to produce highly enriched uranium -- a claim the North Koreans disputed and which was never proved. A denuclearization agreement sealed during six-party talks in 2005 never got off the ground after the U.S. sanctioned a Macau-based bank for laundering North Korean money and encouraged other governments to cut financial ties with Pyongyang. In October 2006, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test, prompting another round of multinational talks that produced an agreement to close its nuclear facilities in exchange for food and energy assistance. That accord collapsed in 2009 following a dispute over inspections.

9. Is accepting North Korea as a nuclear-armed state an option?

Some analysts have suggested that’s the best way to ease tensions, but no major country has said yet that it would go that far. Doing so could lead South Korea, Japan and perhaps Taiwan to seek their own nuclear arms -- undermining, perhaps fatally, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. When tensions were strained last year, South Korean politicians discussed the redeployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons.

The Reference Shelf

• The man who brought Trump and Kim to the table.
• A related QuickTake on North Korea’s nuclear program.
• Will Kim give up his weapons? History says no.
• A Bloomberg infographic on North Korea’s military buildup.
• What an end to the Korean War (after 65 years) would mean.
• Bloomberg explained why the nuclear club is a North Korean obsession.
• A research paper from the U.S.-Korea Institute outlines the expansion of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.

--With assistance from Laurence Arnold.

To contact the reporters on this story: David Tweed in Hong Kong at dtweed@bloomberg.net;Kanga Kong in Seoul at kkong50@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Daniel Ten Kate at dtenkate@bloomberg.net, Lisa Beyer, Grant Clark

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