President Donald Trump has been dillying-dallying about the upcoming summit with Kim Jong Un leader of North Korea to be held in Singapore on 12 June, 2018. First he accepts the invitation and says it will be a historic summit for denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. Then on 24 May he cancels the peace summit and blames North Korea for derailing it because of their hostile response to the provocations made by America for holding a joint military exercise with South Korea on the eve of the summit and his national security adviser John R. Bolton began talking publicly about the “Libyan model” of turning over nuclear weapons, a reference to a deal he helped design in 2003 to be applied to North Korea, which ended tragically for Colonel Muamar Qaddafi in 2011. This has puzzled everyone and the high hopes of having a historic summit dashed by the whims of an erratic and unpredictable Donald Trump.
Kim Jong Un needs money, investment and technology, for sure. But more than that, he needs to convince North Korea’s elites that he has not traded away the only form of security in his sole control — the nuclear patrimony of his father and his grandfather. “For them, ‘getting rich’ is a secondary consideration,” said William Perry, the former secretary of defence and one of the last people to negotiate with the North over peace treaties, nuclear disarmament and missiles — in 1999, when he was sent out as President Bill Clinton’s special envoy. “If I learned anything dealing with them, it’s that their security is pre-eminent. They know we have the capability to defeat them, and they believe we have the intent to do so.” “And the only way to address that,” Mr. Perry, now 90, said this week in Palo Alto, California., as the North Koreans were issuing their latest threats, “is with a step-by-step process, exactly the approach Trump said he did not want to take.
Both Donald trump and Kim Jong Un have different perception and interpretation of denuclearisation, which will be a sticking point in their negotiations. Now after cancelling of the summit Donald Trump has changed his mind again and says the summit will most likely take place on 12 June or a later date. He also said “Kim Jong Un will be safe, he will be happy, his country will be rich,” Mr. Trump said of the North Korean leader on Tuesday, as he met again with Moon Jae-in, the over-optimistic South Korean president. Let us hope this summit takes place and something worthwhile comes out of it.
Baldev Sharma
Rayners Lane, Harrow
