“It’s difficult to have a really good and strong relationship with the leader of a country who you think is totally screwing you,” the former administration official said.
Trump, according to people close to him, is delighted at the prospect that he could win a Nobel Prize and he believes reaching an agreement with North Korea would be the landmark accomplishment of his presidency.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in and President Donald Trump have almost nothing in common. Moon is a soft-spoken, liberal human rights lawyer – and Trump is, well, none of those things.
But the two leaders’ political fortunes are intertwined, now that they’ve made the risky bet that they can orchestrate a game-changing detente with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
Moon’s meeting with Trump at the White House on Tuesday will be a crucial test of whether the unlikely allies will make history or see their lofty plans fizzle out. The two men are slated to hold a 30-minute one-on-one meeting with only their translators, followed by a nearly 90-minute expanded meeting with additional staffers, according to an administration official.
Moon has staked his entire presidency on bringing peace to the Korean peninsula – and he’s expected to use this week’s meeting to assuage Trump’s concerns about whether a deal can be reached with Kim.
Trump’s planned June 12 meeting in Singapore with the North Korean dictator was thrown into doubt last week after bellicose statements from Pyongyang objecting to joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises and hardline rhetoric from Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton.
North Korea’s theatrics have only amplified concerns from regional experts and senior U.S. officials – including Bolton and Vice President Mike Pence – that North Korea isn’t serious about getting a deal. And some in the administration are skeptical that the summit will take place at all.
Trump has started to privately express concern about the summit in part because the president, who prides himself on his ability to make difficult deals, hasn’t yet been able to figure Kim out.
“He was really struggling to read Kim, to understand Kim, and he still is, so he’s at a bit of a loss,” said a former administration official.
Some of the president’s advisers have worried privately that Kim could use Trump’s eagerness for a deal to his advantage in negotiations, according to two people close to Trump. Bolton and other hawks in the administration want to ensure that any agreement involves major, binding concessions from Kim about his nuclear arsenal.
Going into Tuesday’s meeting, Moon’s priority appears to be ensuring that the summit happens, and that the diplomatic momentum he has worked hard to create is not lost.
“He doesn’t have a plan B,” said Patrick M. Cronin, a senior director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, who recently met with South Korean officials in Seoul. “Plan A, plan B, plan C – it’s all advancing the North Korean dialogue.”
Trump and Moon have a cordial, but not overly friendly relationship, according to administration officials and outside experts tracking their interactions.
“It’s not a bad relationship, but I wouldn’t call it a love fest either,” said Jung Pak, a Brookings Institution fellow focused on Korean affairs who worked at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during the Obama administration.
From the beginning, their interactions have been complicated by Trump’s long-standing frustrations with South Korea over trade and defense issues. The president has complained both in public remarks and in private conversations with Moon about the number of U.S. troops at the border between North Korea and South Korea as well as a U.S.-Korea free trade agreement.
“It’s difficult to have a really good and strong relationship with the leader of a country who you think is totally screwing you,” the former administration official said.
Moon, who gave Trump a warm welcome in Seoul last year, has sought to win Trump over since then by underscoring the historic nature of a possible deal with North Korea on nuclear weapons – and by sprinkling in a healthy dose of flattery. “President Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize. What we need is only peace,” Moon said last month in a closed-door meeting with aides that was promptly leaked to reporters.
Trump, according to people close to him, is delighted at the prospect that he could win a Nobel Prize and he believes reaching an agreement with North Korea would be the landmark accomplishment of his presidency. “Everyone thinks so, but I would never say it,” he told reporters earlier this month when asked about the speculation.
But a failure would have devastating political consequences for Moon, whose sky-high approval numbers would certainly take a big hit. A collapse could also reignite Trump’s combative rhetoric against Kim, who he referred to last year as “Little Rocket Man,” and dramatically increase the odds of a military conflict that would engulf the peninsula.
Trump and Kim traded nuclear threats last summer and fall, and the White House alarmed national security experts with talk of military options to prevent North Korea from developing a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking the U.S.
“Moon will be almost desperate to have the summit go through and be declared a success regardless of content because he would be so worried about talk of a return to war, which really traumatized the South Koreans last year,” said Michael Green, who served as senior director for Asian affairs on the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration.
Michael Crowley contributed to this story.
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