Atlantic: Time Running Out for Denuclearization of NKorea

Time is running out for the Trump administration to denuclearize North Korea, according to The Atlantic.

President Donald Trump has met three times with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, obtained a pledge from Pyongyang to not conduct nuclear- and long-range-missile tests, and secured the release of some American prisoners.

But more than a year into Trump's summit diplomacy with Kim, and with Trump's term nearing its end, "the real negotiations haven't even begun," wrote The Atlantic's Uri Friedman.

According to Friedman, Trump "might have to settle" for keeping the North Korean nuclear arsenal from getting much worse — "or maybe, if there's a diplomatic breakthrough, scaling it back."

"You don't have to solve the problem, but you have to show evidence that the problem is being managed," Scott Snyder, a Korea expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Friedman.

"The question becomes, What does a deal look like that can get you started in a credible way but probably not get finished? Simply because there's not enough time."

Still, "as the president has said, sanctions will stay on until the final, fully verified denuclearization" of North Korea, an unnamed senior Trump administration official told Friedman.

According to Friedman, if sanctions hard-liners emerge victorious, North Korea is unlikely to destroy its major nuclear facility at Yongbyon, or consent to an internationally verified freeze of its program in response to the measures U.S. officials have expressed more willingness to adopt during the next round of negotiations.

Toby Dalton, whose team at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has advised U.S. officials, including at the State Department, told Friedman he has gotten two kinds of reactions when he has briefed officials on the Carnegie team's work on implementing "caps" on North Korea's program.

"Early on, the reaction was, 'We're denuclearizing North Korea. We're not just capping their arsenal,'" he said. "More recently, it's been, 'This is an interesting idea, but before we could even get there we need to get into a negotiation, and we're just not there.'"

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