The eyes of the world will be focused on Singapore on June 12 when United States President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jung-un meet in a historic and first-ever summit between the leaders. This is a summit that few could ever have envisioned mere months ago, when both leaders were belittling each other, engaging in personal attacks and trading insults in a most undiplomatic and undignified manner, while their nations seemed set for military confrontation.
So now that this summit date and venue have been set, what can we reasonably expect from the occasion?
Kim has already indicated that he is ready to offer denuclearisation of his nation. On the face of it, that seems a reasonable offer from a regime that has single-mindedly pursued its atomic ambitions at the expense of its national economy, progress and development. But there are also indications that the site of the nuclear programme is now unusable after the most recent underground test last autumn, so Kim’s offer of no more tests may very well reflect that reality on the ground.
In the past two months, Kim has twice visited China and met Chinese President Xi Jinping. The timing of those visits is hardly coincidental, and Beijing has long been Pyongyang’s closest broker during the regime’s long periods of isolation under the current and previous leaderships. The US has long insisted that the crippling economic sanctions in place against North Korea will remain until its nuclear ambitions are fully abandoned. Kim’s meetings with Xi must be focusing on this aspect of any agreement with the US, and what happens afterwards.
While Trump has taken a tough stand against Pyongyang and its nuclear programme, he ought not be duped by the opportunity afforded to him to score a very rare international diplomatic coup. The reality is that the leadership in Pyongyang has signed pledges in the past to denuclearise — pledges that have been broken on a path that took us to the brink of military conflict in late last autumn.
Any agreement reached at the Singapore summit will, therefore, need to result in the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and putting its production facilities beyond use. Both these steps must go hand-in-hand and must be done in a clear, unfettered and verifiable process, with the International Atomic Energy Agency playing the key role in inspections and facilitation. Hyperbole and superlatives aside, only then can the Singapore meeting be called a tremendous and beautiful thing.
