“Even Before Trump and Kim Met, Nuclear Talks Had Run Aground”, The Wall Street Journal
By Michael R. Gordon, Jonathan Cheng and Vivian Salama, March 1, 2019
A U.S. team working ahead of the nuclear talks in Hanoi found North Korea wasn’t willing to budge, expecting far more than they were prepared to give
HANOI—Weeks before President Trump journeyed to Vietnam for his second summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, there were unmistakable signs the historic meeting might not yield an agreement.
The U.S. team of diplomats, sanctions officials, nuclear experts and missile specialists taking part in working-level talks had identified a major stumbling block: North Korea expected much more in sanctions relief than the U.S. was prepared to give in exchange for only limited concessions.
The differences were never ironed out. Some former U.S. officials grumbled privately that the Trump-Kim meeting shouldn’t have taken place until the gaps were narrowed, which is the routine for such a high-level summit.
Even Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday before the summit: “We may not get everything done this week.”
Nonetheless, both Messrs. Trump and Kim were eager to go ahead with the meeting, hoping the other would bend in the heat of their personal chemistry and under the glare of the global spotlight. Reflecting confidence, the White House announced Wednesday, a day before the formal summit meeting, that a joint agreement would be signed the following afternoon.
The president walked away without an agreement that would lead the way for negotiations over the U.S.’s ultimate goal of North Korea’s complete denuclearization.
The unconventional talks were based to a large degree on the rapport between the two leaders, and on the assumption that decisions could only be made at the highest level. Former U.S. officials with experience dealing with North Korea said the differences were too wide to bridge on the basis of personal friendship and should have been at least partly resolved before the meeting.
What has become clear to U.S. officials is that there is no quick solution. Both sides say they intend to keep talking.
This account is based on public statements from top U.S. and North Korean officials and descriptions by participants in the talks.
Well ahead of the Hanoi meeting, the Trump administration had eased its demands, saying it was willing to be patient. The administration raised hopes of a major advanced toward a grand bargain that would lead to specific, agreed-upon steps to strip North Korea of its nuclear arsenal and build a new relationship between the old adversaries.
The U.S. was no longer insisting that North Korea largely denuclearize during Mr. Trump’s current term in office. Nor was it demanding that Pyongyang provide a full accounting of its nuclear and missile programs at the start of negotiations.
In the months leading up the summit, North Korea demonstrated its own degree of flexibility.
During a meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in September, the North Korean leader made clear that he was prepared to offer inspections at a missile-launch site, though without specifying how they would be conducted, and to potentially close some facilities at the Yongbyon nuclear complex.
The 3-square-mile Yongbyon site, which contains hundreds of buildings, has been the centerpiece of North Korea’s nuclear efforts since the start of its nuclear program in the 1960s.
In return, North Korean officials signaled that they expected significant sanctions relief.
Stephen Biegun, U.S. special envoy for North Korea, traveled to Pyongyang for three days of meetings in February, where he met with his newly-designated counterpart, the diplomat Kim Hyok Chol.
About a week before the summit, Mr. Biegun and a team of experts flew to Hanoi for marathon meetings with North Korea’s delegation, which again included Kim Hyok Chol, as well as foreign ministry officials and others.
“We were prepared to evaluate any proposal that they put forward, and we did so with great seriousness,” a senior State Department official said.
The U.S. team struggled to close the divide between the two sides.
As the Americans saw it, the North Koreans were angling for the removal of all sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council after March 2016. The sanctions prohibit trade in metals, seafood and coal, and sharply limit imports of refined and raw petroleum.
When the U.S. team asked what exemptions North Korea was seeking, it seemed the answer was virtually everything, except for weapons.
The Americans crunched the numbers and calculated that removing the requested restrictions would be worth billions of dollars to North Korea. It turned out to be a concession the Trump administration wasn’t prepared to make in return for the shutdown of only a part of the Yongbyon complex.
The closure of facilities at Yongbyon that produce plutonium and highly enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons would be significant. Yet even as a first move, administration officials wanted more in exchange.
North Korea hadn’t conducted a nuclear test since September 2017, or a missile launch since November 2017, but U.S. officials indicated that an initial step should include an across-the-board freeze of North Korea’s work on its nuclear and missile programs, as well as its chemical and biological weapons efforts.
That would bring a halt to production of fissile material not only at Yongbyon, but also at North Korea’s clandestine facilities, including those identified by U.S. intelligence over the years.
The North Koreans have publicly insisted that they had no other nuclear facilities. The country’s largest newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun, dismissed as fiction last fall the “theory of suspected North Korea’s secret nuclear facilities.”
U.S. diplomats also made clear that Pyongyang would be expected to stop work at its missile factories, which satellite imagery suggested continue to churn out more long-range ballistic missiles.
The U.S. was loath to give up the economic leverage it had gained through a regime of so-called maximum pressure, instituted through a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions and Treasury Department sanctions.
Yet eager to ensure a diplomatic success in Hanoi, top Trump administration officials dangled the prospect of some economic relief as the summit approached if the North would take important steps toward denuclearization
Whatever was agreed, officials said, a freeze on nuclear, missile and other weapons of mass destruction programs would need to be part of it.
That meant North Korean commitments toward denuclearization, rather than progress only on other trust-building measures, would be fundamental to any U.S. agreement.
Even before the two leaders met, that goal appeared a far reach.
When Messrs. Trump and Kim finally met in Hanoi on Wednesday evening, the mood was light, and hopes were high on both sides for concessions. After shaking hands for their first meeting in eight months, Mr. Trump reached over frequently to touch Mr. Kim’s elbow. The president giggled and whispered with his younger counterpart. At other times, he leaned in to chat.
As he had done at their meeting last year in Singapore, Mr. Trump tried to persuade Mr. Kim with the prospects of a bright economic future. “With this great leadership, I really believe that North Korea is going to be very successful, and economically, it’s going to be something very, very special,” he said as he sat across a table from Mr. Kim on Thursday morning.
It became clear as the two sides talked that Mr. Kim wasn’t prepared to freeze his weapons of mass destruction programs or dismantle sites beyond facilities at Yongbyon. Even the definition of which facilities at Yongbyon would be covered by the North Korean offer remained unclear.
“The president in his discussions challenged the North Koreans to go bigger,” the senior State Department official said. “The president encouraged Chairman Kim to go all in.”
Mr. Kim didn’t budge, and Mr. Trump wouldn’t budge on the North’s demand for sanctions relief.
The two leaders had failed to bridge the differences that kept their advisers apart in the days and weeks leading to the summit.
Mr. Trump, in his news conference afterward, said “there are sites that people don’t know about that we know about.” That was an apparent reference to one or two clandestine high-enriched uranium facilities the U.S. said North Korea had developed.
North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho called a midnight press conference to contest Mr. Trump’s portrayal of the talks, saying his side had been reasonable in their demands for what he portrayed as partial sanctions relief in exchange for the shuttering and inspection of some facilities at Yongbyon.
By then, Mr. Trump had already departed for the long flight home.
As officials on both sides grapple with the fallout, what happens next is uncertain. Both leaders said their regard for each other is undiminished.
U.S. officials say they are encouraged by Mr. Kim’s affirmation that a moratorium on testing missiles and nuclear weapons would stand, and they consider Pyongyang serious about negotiating over the Yongbyon complex.
“They were pretty expansive with respect to what they were prepared to do at Yongbyon, but there were still not complete clarity with respect to the full scope of what it is they were prepared to offer,” Mr. Pompeo said at a news conference after the summit. “It’s one of the reasons I hope we can get back, so that we can put some definition around that.”
— Andrew Jeong and Timothy W. Martin contributed to this article.