Talking about summitry

By Donald Kirk

Summitry is in the air. Excitement and speculation are rife. Everyone is talking about talking. How about talks between the leaders of the two Koreas, between each of them and the U.S. president, maybe a meeting of all three together?

President Moon Jae-in has just sat down with President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the G-20 gathering in Buenos Aires, and they both came out bursting with optimism about more summits. Trump is talking about seeing Kim Jong-un for their second summit early next year. He mentioned three possible venues but didn't say which, prompting a lot of guessing.

Moon, meanwhile, would love to receive Kim in Seoul. The mere idea of the North Korean leader deigning to visit the South Korean capital is mesmerizing. It was all well and good for him to step across the line at their first summit in April, but that gesture was really symbolic, a photo-op. Three South Korean presidents have gone to Pyongyang ― Kim Dae-jung in 2000, Roh Moo-hyun in 2007 and Moon in September. Kim's late father, Kim Jong-il, promised return visits to the South but never made it. There's been talk of Kim Jong-un getting to Seoul this month, but time is running short.

Moon if anything gives higher priority to Trump and Kim meeting again than to welcoming Kim at the Blue House. The thinking is another Trump-Kim summit could jump-start the stalled process of reconciliation. All those two need do is sign off on another nice-sounding declaration and then North Korea will seriously give up its nuclear-and-missile program, and the U.S. and U.N will drop those sanctions that are seen as such a barrier to progress.

Actually, a reality check may be in order. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and a former senior diplomat in the State Department, warns that “summitry diplomacy can be a source of friction if it is not a source of clarity.” That's a comment more on the outcome of Trump's summit with Kim in Singapore in June than on Moon's three meetings with Kim.

Trump may think he reached a real deal with Kim at their Singapore summit, but their joint statement on “denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula had no real meaning. “North Korea has little or no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons,” as Haass noted at a symposium that I attended in Washington. “It is unlikely the problem will be resolved.”

Ok, but if that's the case, what's the harm of the two leaders at least sitting down and talking things over? A burst of “flowery” language, in Haass's view, may do more harm than good. “I don't want people to say we tried diplomacy and failed,” said Haass. “Talking can become a cover that gives the impression of progress.”

Worse yet, amid the talking, North Korean physicists and engineers and technicians are sure to go on developing more and better nukes and missiles even if they haven't tested any for more than a year. There's no way the North is going to provide a list, as the Americans have been asking, of the places they're harboring facilities, much less provide an inventory of all the warheads they've produced.

Nor, amazingly, has the whole issue of thousands of North Korean artillery pieces trained on Seoul, Incheon and nearby bases come up for discussion. “I'm surprised by the lack of emphasis in Seoul on conventional weapons,” said Haass. That issue is all the more shocking considering the South's acquiescence to a no-fly zone that bans routine reconnaissance south of the demilitarized zone ― essential to defense of the South.

As for North Korea's egregious record on human rights, the tens of thousands held within the North's gulag system, the total absence of freedom of speech, religion or anything else, forget it. Nobody's mentioning all that as a topic for dialogue on any level.

So what would come from another Trump-Kim summit? A “peace declaration”? If Kim did see Trump again, he would like them both to sign off on a statement saying the Korean War was over, after which North Korea could rev up demands for withdrawal of U.S. troops from the South.

“An end-of-war declaration is a declaration,” said Haass. “It does not have any real meaning.” That's not to say, though, that Trump and Kim shouldn't stage another summit. Having cancelled joint U.S.-South Korean war games after their first summit, maybe Trump could ask Kim what he means by denuclearization. They're far from agreeing on definition of the word, much less on anything else.

Donald Kirk (www.donaldkirk.com) has been covering the ups and downs of diplomacy with North Korea since first coming to Seoul in 1972 for the North-South Red Cross talks.