Plan B Forum

U.S. drops demand for full accounting of N. Korea nuclear program ahead of talks

HANOI, Vietnam — U.S. negotiators are no longer demanding that North Korea agree to disclose a full accounting of its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs as part of talks this week between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, according to current and former senior U.S. officials.

The decision to drop, for now, a significant component of a potential nuclear deal suggests a reality that U.S. intelligence assessments have stressed for months is shaping talks as they progress: North Korea does not intend to fully denuclearize, which is the goal Trump set for his talks with Kim.

Disclosure of a full, verifiable declaration of North Korea’s programs is the issue over which the last round of serious negotiations between Pyongyang and world powers, including the U.S., fell apart a decade ago.

Negotiations between U.S. and North Korean officials in advance of Trump and Kim’s second summit, which begins Wednesday night over dinner in Hanoi, have focused heavily on a core component of Pyongyang’s program, the Yongbyon nuclear reactor, officials said. Dr. Siegfried Hecker, a nuclear scientist who has visited the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center numerous times to assess the country's capabilities, said dismantling elements of the facility would be the most significant step North Korea could take toward denuclearization.

“Yongbyon is the heart of North Korea’s nuclear program,” Hecker said, explaining that completely dismantling the reactor there would be critical and would mean North Korea would never be able to make plutonium there again.

he White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration is hoping to get a significant concession from North Korea on Yongbyon, but it’s unclear if the U.S. can offer something in exchange that Kim would accept. North Korea wants sanctions relief, and U.S. officials have advised the president against taking such a step at this stage in negotiations. North Korea has offered to freeze activity at Yongbyon in past rounds of negotiations with previous U.S. administrations.

Current and former U.S. officials note that North Korea has other sites with similar capabilities, however, and they are raising concerns that Pyongyang won’t negotiate on all aspects of its weapons programs if it’s not forced to disclose them.

In recent months researchers have discovered that North Korea has as many as 20 undisclosed ballistic missile sites, according to Beyond Parallel, a project sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a defense think tank. One of the sites is the Sino-ri Missile Base about 130 miles north of the demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea, where about 28,000 U.S. troops are stationed.

North Korea hasn’t launched a missile test since engaging diplomatically with the U.S. last year, but it has continued to otherwise refine and advance its nuclear weapons program in the months since Trump first met with Kim last June in Singapore, U.S. officials have said.

Trump walks away from deal with North Korea's Kim over sanctions demand

HANOI (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he had walked away from a nuclear deal at his summit with Kim Jong Un because of unacceptable demands from the North Korean leader to lift punishing U.S.-led sanctions.

Trump said two days of talks in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi had made good progress in building relations and on the key issue of denuclearization, but it was important not to rush into a bad deal.

“It was all about the sanctions,” Trump said at a news conference after the talks were cut short. “Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn’t do that.”

With normal presidents, summit deals are largely agreed upon ahead of time. As one veteran diplomat put it, presidents pull rabbits out of hats, after diplomats have worked diligently ahead of time to stuff the rabbits into the hats. But Trump has never had much patience for that meticulous diplomatic process, instead placing excessive faith in breakthroughs arising from personal relationships — and his faith was clearly misplaced this time.

Trump’s rhetoric on military exercises gets more embarrassing

One of the biggest surprises from Donald Trump’s first summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un was a unilateral concession from the American president: the Republican announced that he had canceled military training exercises with our South Korean allies, for the first time in 70 years, in exchange for nothing. (We later learned the president got the idea from Vladimir Putin.)

Soon after, Trump scrambled to justify the concession, but in the process, he ended up echoing North Korean talking points. The American leader criticized his own country’s military exercises as “very provocative” and “inappropriate.”

This morning, following the collapse of his nuclear talks with his dictatorial pal in Pyongyang, Trump went quite a bit further.

“Well, you know, the military exercises, I gave that up quite a while ago because it costs us $100 million every time we do it. We fly these massive bombers in from Guam. And when I first started, a certain general said, ‘Oh, yes, sir, we fly them in from Guam. It’s right next door.’ Well, right next door is seven hours away. And then they come and they drop millions of dollars of bombs, and then they go back and –

“But we would spend — I mean, we spent hundreds of millions of dollars on those exercises, and I hated to see it. I thought it was unfair.

“So those exercises are very expensive. And I was telling the generals – I said, ‘Look, you know, exercising is fun and it’s nice and they play the war games.’ And I’m not saying it’s not necessary, because at some levels it is, but at other levels it’s not. But it’s a very, very expensive thing. And you know, we do have to think about that too.”

He did not appear to be kidding.

It’s worth taking a moment to set the record straight. For example, when Trump referred to the exercises as being “unfair,” he meant with regards to South Korea paying the United States – because in this president’s mind, everything is a transaction.

But even putting that side, according to the Pentagon, military training exercises with our South Korean allies cost $14 million. To you and me, that’s a lot of money, but for the federal government of the world’s preeminent superpower, it is not a considerable expense. Indeed, the White House wanted to spend more than that on a parade, and the administration already spends more than that on Trump’s trips to his for-profit social club in south Florida.

It’s also not, as Trump insisted this morning, $100 million.

But making matters just a little worse was Trump’s assertion that the exercises are “fun” and “nice.” It’s unsettling to think about, but the president may have heard the phrase “war games,” and concluded that they are actual games – as if the Department of Defense is engaging in recreational activities when it holds training sessions in the Pacific with our allies.

Whether Trump is comically ignorant or perhaps peddling nonsense to rationalize a strategic mistake is unclear. Either way, the president had several months to come up with decent talking points to defend his own policy, and if this is the best he could do, it suggests there is no good defense.

Trump was out of his depth in Hanoi. This failure is his greatest flop yet

Donald Trump’s self-reverential style of personalised, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants diplomacy just crashed and burned in Hanoi. It is fitting, perhaps, that Vietnam – scene of past American humiliations – was the setting for the blunderer-in-chief’s greatest flop. Trump tried to wing it in nuclear talks with North Korea’s more canny leader, Kim Jong-un, and got what he deserved: precisely nothing. The summit, like last year’s effort in Singapore, was a Trump vanity project – and proved a labour in vain.

In principle just about everybody, including close neighbours South Korea, China and Russia, would like to see North Korea’s nuclear arsenal brought under international supervision, and preferably eliminated altogether. To make such a mess of things, given this exceptional consensus, is a true measure of Trump’s incomparable incompetence. Yet this is barely a surprise. It is entirely of a piece with his amateurish approach to key foreign policy challenges the world over.

Given the lack of progress in preparatory talks, it was a wonder the US went ahead with the summit at all. Pre-meeting media reports, quoting senior officials, suggested growing concern in Washington that Kim had no intention of complying with the core demand for denuclearisation, or of fully listing his nuclear facilities. As it turns out, they were right. But Trump insisted on having his moment.

Trump’s advisers were also worried he would make reckless, unilateral concessions, as he did last year when he suddenly cancelled US-South Korean military exercises. Before the summit, and again after it, Trump said he would be content if North Korea merely continued its moratorium on missile and bomb testing.

Talk about giving away the shop. For a man who prides himself on driving a hard bargain, it was remarkably naive.

In truth, Trump made the summit all about him. His main objective was to enhance the delusional image he has of himself as global peacemaker. He firmly believes he deserves the Nobel peace prize. In this year’s State of the Union address he loudly praised himself for saving millions of lives by averting a “major war” in Korea. If such a war was ever a real prospect, it was largely because of Trump’s panicky response to Kim’s 2017 long-range ballistic missile tests. He was out of his depth then, and was so again in Hanoi.

The summit failure is a big setback for South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, who, notwithstanding Trump’s shenanigans, has worked hard to build bridges to the North. But Kim will be more than happy. Thanks to Trump, the process of his international rehabilitation continues – a political coming-out parade that began in Singapore. His standing, at home and abroad, has been further enhanced at no political cost.

While Kim basks in Trump’s praise as a “great leader” and “friend”, an outmanoeuvred, out-thought US president has been left to trail home with nothing to show. Kim will not worry, for example, that an always symbolic end to the 1950-53 Korean war was not agreed. But he will be delighted the risk of precipitate American military action has further receded. Meanwhile, he can continue his covert nuclear build-up.

On the advice of John Bolton, his national security adviser, Trump resisted Kim’s demand that all US sanctions be lifted. But his agreement to continue lower-level bilateral talks – and the de facto “normalisation” of US-North Korea relations that implies – means China, Russia and other countries that are already bypassing UN-led sanctions on Pyongyang will feel free to go further.

Trump’s inability to lay a diplomatic glove on Kim in the Hanoi rematch also means North Korea’s dictator has again emerged unscathed over his regime’s appalling human rights abuses. When it suits him, Trump is quick to use human rights as a stick to beat governments in Iran or Venezuela. In his 2018 State of the Union address, before he got chummy with Kim, Trump declared: “No regime has oppressed its own citizens more totally or brutally than the cruel dictatorship in North Korea.”

Trump was right, or at least his speechwriter was. Kim presides over a gulag of forced labour camps of appalling inhumanity. North Koreans are subject to arbitrary arrest, torture and indefinite incarceration without trial. The regime’s corrupt and incompetent economic management has caused mass starvation.

Yet in Hanoi, his confected fury forgotten, Trump made no mention of these ongoing abuses, nor did he try to do anything to curb them. When asked about an American student, Otto Warmbier, who was mistreated in a North Korean prison and later died, he absolved Kim of responsibility. Kim, he said, “felt badly” but “didn’t know about it”. It was another Khashoggi moment – and similarly stomach-turning.

Trumps’s rightwing nationalistic instincts; his coddling of dictators; his cultivated ignorance of complex, sensitive international problems; and his image-driven refusal to look beyond the next news cycle, have become fixed features of his foreign policy approach.

It is this approach that has given us the appeasement of Vladimir Putin’s Russia at Europe’s expense, cut-and-run troop withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan, a dangerously obsessive vendetta against Iran, an unconscionable betrayal of the Palestinians, and a chaotic attempt to impose regime change on Venezuela.

Trump’s Hanoi bumbling follows a set pattern of unfitness. It is the very opposite of leadership. And it can only give comfort to the enemy.

Dennis Rodman wants to help Donald Trump win Nobel Prize with North Korea deal

Former NBA star Dennis Rodman predicts President Donald Trump could win a Nobel Peace Prize if he reaches a nuclear deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — and he's willing to help.

Rodman is not in Vietnam, site of this week's summit, though he had gone to Singapore in 2018 when the leaders first met.

Writing in a letter to the president that he shared on Twitter, Rodman promised after the summit to follow up "with you, your team and my good friend, Chairman Kim."

Rodman had made friends with Kim, a basketball fan, during a visit to North Korea in 2013. He was headed to that country in 2017 when American hostage Otto Warmbier was released from prison.

The two-time NBA All-Star said he hopes Trump will take advantage of that friendship and his role as ambassador of goodwill.

"We have a lot of work to do, but with your diverse team, amazing global contacts and willingness to think outside the box, we can have peace on the Korean Peninsula," Rodman wrote. "We really can.

"You are on the cusp of a big, beautiful deal. One that would make you the front runner for a Nobel Peace Prize without question. You have my forever and forever support!"

Trump: I Take Kim Jong Un At His Word He Wasn't Involved With Otto Warmbier, "He Felt Badly About It"

President Trump said North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un told him he had nothing to do with the treatment of deceased ex-American prisoner Otto Warmbier and that he takes him at his word. Trump said it was not in Kim's "interest" and it "wasn't to his advantage" to have let Warmbier fall into a coma while imprisoned in North Korea.

Trump held a press conference after the summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un ended early with no deal.

"I did speak about it, and I don't believe that he would have allowed that to happen," Trump said of Otto Warmbier's death. "It just wasn't to his advantage to allow that to happen. Those prisons are rough, they're rough places and bad things happened... I don't believe he knew about it."

"He felt badly about it. He knew the case very well, but he knew it later," Trump said of Kim Jong Un. "In those prisons and those camps you have a lot of people. And some really bad things happened to Otto, some really, really bad things. He tells me that he didn't know about it, and I will take him at his word."