TOKYO (AP) - When President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un meet in Singapore next month, assuming they can stay on track long enough to make it happen, they will have two very different agendas.
Washington has set the bar for the summit extremely high - complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization. Pyongyang, meanwhile, has a pretty tall order of its own: the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, with the precondition that the “hostile policy” of the U.S. toward their country must first end.
For sure, bridging that gap will be quite a feat. Both leaders might well opt instead for a “shiny object summit,” a meeting that is heavier on photo ops and TV-friendly sound bites than on long-term change.
But what if they really go for a deal?
Here are few of the possibilities they might explore:
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HANDING SOME OVER
Reports, albeit speculative and anonymously sourced, keep popping up that Kim may be willing to hand over several of his nuclear weapons as a sign of sincerity.
As far as theatrics go, this would be hard to top....
It would be a tangible, dramatic move that could happen very quickly - factors that would certainly appeal to the reality TV show side of Trump. It could even be big enough to earn him a shot at that Nobel Peace Prize he says everyone is talking about.Outlandish as it sounds, something like this was what national security adviser John Bolton had in mind when he suggested the Libya model as a good example for North Korea to follow. After Libya unilaterally decided to give up its fledgling nuclear program in 2003, planeloads of documents, equipment and even centrifuges related to the country’s nuclear and missile programs were transported by U.S. military aircraft to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.But considering the way leader Moammar Gadhafi was deposed and killed several years later, Pyongyang flipped out at Bolton’s suggestion, almost dooming the summit itself. Arms control experts have also noted that, unlike Libya, the North is already a nuclear power. So the Libya model really doesn’t fit.There are other problems, too.North Korea is believed to have several dozen nuclear weapons, so handing over a few - spectacular as that would be - wouldn’t really solve anything unless a further agreement was made regarding what to do with the rest. At the same time, for the North, it would be a huge and painful concession.Nuclear weapons are top secret for a reason. Giving even one would potentially reveal details of design and technology that the North’s military would rather keep to itself.___CAP AND FREEZEKim has already promised to stop launching intercontinental ballistic missiles and conducting nuclear tests. He even made a big show of demolishing tunnels at Punggye-ri, the North’s only known underground testing site.That’s a start.But North Korea has announced similar moratoriums before, only to change its mind later. Nothing Kim has done so far