With less than a week to go until the historic Trump-Kim summit on June 12 in Singapore, details of the US-led agenda are starting to emerge, with Bloomberg and Reuters reporting that the White House wants North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to commit to a timetable to surrender his country’s nuclear arsenal when he meets with Trump during the high-stakes summit that could last as long as two days, or end right there and then if Kim balks at the demand.
Citing a US official, Bloomberg reported that Trump has been advised not to offer Kim any concessions as the White House seeks to put the onus on the North Koreans to make the summit a success; having already canceled the meeting once, the president is reportedly determined to walk out of the meeting if it doesn’t go well.
Alternatively, if things go as planned and if the two men hit it off, Trump may offer Kim a follow-up summit at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, as soon as this fall.
Other than confirming what we already knew, namely that the two will first meet next Tuesday at 9 a.m. at the Capella Hotel on Singapore’s Sentosa Island, the White House has described no schedule for the summit. If the first meeting goes well, there will be further events that day and perhaps even the next day.
Trump will be joined in Singapore by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House chief of staff John Kelly and national security adviser John Bolton. The U.S. delegation also tentatively includes the CIA’s top Korea expert, Andrew Kim; the National Security Council’s point person on the Koreas, Allison Hooker; and White House deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin, who has negotiated much of the groundwork for the summit.
Trump’s summit with North Korea’s Kim will take place at the Capella Hotel on Singapore’s Sentosa Island. https://t.co/0doFWQNK4Q pic.twitter.com/zCPr46bDx7
— CNBC (@CNBC) June 6, 2018
Absent from Trump’s delegation will be some notable names: Vice President Mike Pence, who will remain in the U.S., and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. Mattis said Sunday at a defense conference in Singapore that North Korea will win relief from crippling U.S. economic sanctions “only when it demonstrates verifiable and irreversible steps to denuclearization.”
To be sure, North Korea has publicly bristled at U.S. officials’ insistence on the so-called “Libya Approach”, i.e., that it must agree to disarm before receiving anything in return, instead calling for a step-by-step approach to ridding the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons. Trump has indicated flexibility in his approach, although it is still unclear what a path to denuclearization would look like.
Pompeo, who has traveled to Pyongyang twice since March, has prepared Trump for the summit in eight to 10 hours of briefings per week for several weeks, two U.S. officials said. The CIA’s Kim has usually joined him. On Tuesday, former Sens. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, who cosponsored a law aimed at securing and dismantling nuclear weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union, briefed Trump and Pence on the lessons they had learned.
Some more details on the actual summit:
Typically, the president’s preparations for meetings with foreign leaders are shaped by several administration officials and result in a pair of briefing books. One, on customs and protocol, primarily is assembled by the State Department and is shared with much of the U.S. delegation. The other is a more exclusive document for the president that includes a biography of the foreign leader assembled by the U.S. intelligence community. It also sometimes includes memos from individual Cabinet members with their private assessments of the leader.
Trump’s aides consider him ready for a summit in which the White House believes he holds an advantage — Singapore is a Westernized metropolis and will be the farthest Kim Jong Un has traveled since taking charge of his country in 2011. It was not clear if Kim still demands that someone foot the bill for his hotel room.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials reportedly believe Kim is extremely worried about security at the summit and is fearful of assassination attempts, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Frustrated after the North Koreans cut off communications for about five days last month and snubbed Hagin at a preparatory meeting in Singapore, Trump canceled the summit on May 24. Talks resumed, however, and Kim dispatched an envoy — spy chief Kim Yong Chol — to Washington on Friday to deliver a letter to Trump. The letter, handwritten by Kim in Korean, expressed his desire for the summit.
Trump said later that day that the Singapore meeting was back on. Kim Yong Chol also brought Trump a gift, and Trump reciprocated with a gift for Kim. White House officials declined to describe either present.
On Tuesday, the White House announced that the summit will be held at the Capella Hotel on Singapore’s southern island of Sentosa, as had been leaked previously.
To avoid “incidents”, Singapore airspace will be restricted during the planned summit, according to a notice posted by the International Civil Aviation Organization and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday.
via RSS https://ift.tt/2sLdKmL Tyler Durden