[Analytics] Bright spots seen in Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un’s meeting

What has been viewed as a failure in Hanoi could actually provide a stronger foundation for future talks, according to an expert on US-Korea policy. ‘We got to a level of detail that has eluded us for quite a while,’ a senior US State Department official said. Robert Delaney, Owen Churchill specially for the South China Morning Post.

In the wake of US President Donald Trump’s meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, two US defence and security experts are questioning the perception that the summit was a failure because it ended without a new agreement.

“The history of US-North Korea relations over the past 25 years has been this comic book, black-and-white understanding of history … and this particular summit, which is obviously part of that history, is already being portrayed in a comic book fashion,” Joel Wit, director of 38 North, a website devoted to analysis of North Korea, said on Friday at the New York-based Korea Society.

“Both leaders are heavily invested in this process, and particularly Kim Jong-un,” said Wit, who coordinated implementation of the US-Korea Agreed Framework in 1994 during the presidency of Bill Clinton. That accord collapsed when North Korea was caught enriching uranium.

“His process wasn’t to gather the international media for a photo opp, which a lot of people say. This is a real shift in North Korean policy, and he’s trying to move down a different road,” Wit said. “There was progress made at the summit on a variety of issues, just not enough to reach a final agreement.”

Wit did not provide specifics about what progress was achieved, but his impressions are in line with remarks by a senior US State Department official who said on Friday: “We ended on a very good note between the two sides.”

“We just couldn’t get there on the agreement at this point, but … we got to a level of detail that has eluded us for quite a while, certainly since the Singapore joint statement [in June], including things like what is the definition of the Yongbyon nuclear complex, which is a very important issue for us as we look to disassemble the entire weapons of mass destruction programme in North Korea,” the official told reporters.

The Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Centre, which the North Korean military has been building up since the 1990s, is considered the heart of Pyongyang’s nuclear programme.

During working-level talks leading up to the meeting between Trump and Kim, North Korea offered to dismantle the site in return for the lifting of a broad range of sanctions imposed by the United Nations, the State Department official said.

North Korea was unwilling to freeze its nuclear programme, the US official said, meaning that giving “many, many billions of dollars in sanctions relief would in effect put us in a position of subsidising the ongoing development of weapons of mass destruction in North Korea”.

“We didn’t get a deal because the deal wasn’t there to be had,” the official said, adding that there was room “to continue talking”.

Security expert Scott Snyder said on Thursday that the breakdown in Hanoi “actually added a little more transparency to the gap” that has existed between Pyongyang and Washington both in terms of trust and what both sides understand as the scope for denuclearisation and the scope for sanctions relief.

Snyder, director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ US-Korea policy programme, told reporters in a briefing call that the ostensible “failure” could in fact provide a stronger foundation for future communications than that which followed the “success” of the first Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore.

Failure to make a deal “has provided the US and North Korea an opportunity to better … understand what each other wants”, he said, adding that he hoped for an “early resumption” of working-level talks.

US Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun, who has led discussions at the lower level, was absent from the talks in Hanoi, raising questions about the integration of working-level and leader-level negotiations.

Trump was accompanied by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who has limited foreign policy experience.

“It is true that some of the meetings’ structures … might have been better organised to reinforce the importance of the special representative’s role,” said Snyder, though he added that “the North Koreans at least had the experience of accepting and interacting with the special representative”, who visited Pyongyang in early February to pave the way for this week’s talks.