Trump May Get Another Summit With North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un Amid Rising Tensions and More Missile Tests

SEOUL — President Trump has a real shot at a fourth meeting with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un despite Pyongyang’s claim that its latest missiles can obliterate whatever they hit. Foreign policy experts, at a gathering convened by South Korea’s leading think tank, the Asan Institute of Policy Studies, forecast renewed contact after North Korea spent two days test-firing short-range missiles tipped with cluster bombs.Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency said the shots fired off its east coast showed the “cluster munitions power of a tactical ballistic missile warhead.” KCNA boasted that the missile, a variant of the Hwasong 11, modeled after the Russian Iskander, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, can “reduce to ashes any target covering an area of 6.5-7 hectares (16-17.2 acres) with the highest-density power.”After North Korea announced the tests, analysts said they still believed Mr. Trump would fulfill his hopes for another meeting with Mr. Kim, who has repeatedly made clear he would never give up his nuclear program.A senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Michael Schiffer, predicted “renewed emphasis on talks with the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) at some point in the second Trump administration.” The sense among experts at the conference was that Mr. Trump is hoping that his summit with Communist China’s President Xi Jinping, now set for mid-May in Beijing, will pave the way for another meeting with Mr. Kim.It’s even possible that Mr. Trump will fly to Pyongyang for an unprecedented visit to the North Korean capital after seeing Mr. Xi. The director of the Korean program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, Victor Cha, saw “a greater than 50 percent chance” that Messrs. Trump and Kim would meet again. While Mr. Xi would not be happy if Mr. Trump met Mr. Kim before going to Beijing, he said they might meet soon afterwards.The president of the influential Korea Diplomacy Plaza, Kim Joon-hyung, a member of Korea’s national assembly, said “the prospect of meeting Mr. Trump has increased” since the American show of force in Iran. Kim Jong-un believes he “needs to maintain good relations with the U.S.,” he said.If Mr. Trump does go to Pyongyang, he will set a precedent that’s eluded his predecessors since the Korean War ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, in July 1953. No sitting American president has been there.President Clinton had hoped to go to Pyongyang before his second term ended in January 2001 but did not get there until August 2009 when he picked up two American journalists who had been seized on North Korea’s border with China. Former President Carter saw Kim Jong-un’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, the regime founder, in Pyongyang in September 1994.For Mr. Trump, a stopover in Pyongyang would revive a bond formed in their first summit in Singapore in June 2018. Mr. Trump walked out of their second summit in Hanoi in February 2019 after Mr. Kim refused to give up his nukes. In an impromptu meeting in June 2019 at the truce village of Panmunjom, they stepped briefly across the line into North Korea but did not agree to keep talking.Mr. Trump has often said he and Mr. Kim “fell in love” in Singapore and remained on close terms. This time around, however, Mr. Trump would almost certainly have to accept the reality that there’s no way Mr. Kim will sacrifice North Korea’s status as the world’s ninth nuclear power.“Nobody seriously talks about denuclearization,” said a former Japanese diplomat, Mitoji Yabunaka. “Even President Trump has referred to North Korea as a nuclear state.” Still, he said, Washington should not formally “recognize” North Korea as such while hoping to ease tensions that have risen sharply since the flurry of talks, and talks about talks, in 2018 and 2019.A RAND Corporation specialist on North Korea, Bruce Bennett, said Mr. Kim has “worsened the deterrence advantage,” which “will continue to grow.” While gathering intelligence on North Korea is “even more difficult than Iran, he said, “We need to think about an overall deterrent strategy.”If it’s impossible to get Mr. Kim to denuclearize, experts believe Mr. Trump can still focus on other issues. A former member of the national security council during Mr. Trump’s first term, Fred Fleitz, said he believed there’s “a good chance of a Trump-Kim summit this fall” before crucial midterm congressional elections. Whenever they do meet, Mr. Fleitz said Mr. Trump should ask Mr. Kim “to stop sending weapons” for Russia’s war in Ukraine. “They are helping a disastrously bloody war,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a lot to ask for Trump to say that to Kim Jong-un.”

Trump May Get Another Summit With North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un Amid Rising Tensions and More Missile Tests

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