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.
The Capella Hotel stands on the island of Sentosa in Singapore
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
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...