North Korea negotiations

Since President Donald Trump’s initial campaign and eventual bid for the presidency, he has set lofty goals for his own administration and repeatedly boasted, as his presidency continues, that these goals would all be fulfilled. One of the relatively more recent goals he set for his presidency is something no president since the 1950s has come close to achieving: the denuclearization of North Korea.

North Korea is currently ruled by the totalitarian hand of Kim-Jong Un, who has spent much of his own country’s resources on nuclear weapons and testing to build up an arsenal, despite repeated sanctions placed by the United States to attempt to force them to disarm. However, Trump believes recent and future negotiations – including a planned meeting with Kim himself – with the relatively closed-off country will lead to success.

“They asked for the meeting and we continue to be open to it,” Vice President Mike Pence said to Fox News. “But rest assured that the United States will continue on the path that we are on because this president has made it clear that we will not tolerate North Korea possessing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that threaten the United States and our allies.”

North Korea, meanwhile, has taken a displeased tone with the stance U.S. officials are taking with their no-compromise stance on denuclearization.

“If the U.S. is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but reconsider our proceeding to the DPRK-U.S. summit,” said Kim Kye Gwan, a North Korean official.

This statement, if accurate to North Korea’s feelings on the matter, would force the negotiations to be what many analysts feared – a peace treaty that does nothing about Korea’s nuclear arsenal.

“If you just sign a treaty because it sounds Nobel Peace Prize-worthy, but you don’t address the threat, then you’ve created a more dangerous situation,” Bruce Klingner, a specialist in Korean and Japanese affairs at the Heritage Foundation in Washington said. “Signing a peace treaty that triggers a reduction of U.S. forces on the peninsula without getting anything in return from the North on nuclear or even conventional artillery aimed at Seoul or missiles aimed at Tokyo would be a disastrous success.”