The NPR Politics Podcast - At A Historic Summit, President Trump Praises Kim's Commitment To Denuclearize

Episode Date: June 12, 2018

Following a historic summit in Singapore, President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed a broad statement Tuesday that calls for a "firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula." Though critics suggest that the U.S. appears to have made more concessions than the regime. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, White House reporter Ayesha Rascoe, White House Correspondent Scott Horsley, and Seoul Bureau Chief Elise Hu. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, this is David and Laura in sunny Singapore, where we are planning our heavily disrupted routes to work this week. This podcast was recorded at 5.55 a.m. in Washington, p.m. in Singapore on Tuesday, June 12th. Things may have changed by the time you listen to this. Here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. Moments ago, President Trump made this announcement. Chairman Kim and I just signed a joint statement in which he reaffirmed his unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

So we are here in the studio to tell you everything that happened in Singapore while you were asleep. I'm Scott Detrow, I cover Congress. I'm Scott Horsley, I cover the White House. I'm Aisha Roscoe. I also cover the White House. And today we have a very special guest who I'm very excited about, Seoul Bureau Chief Elise Hu. Elise, hello. Hello. You might be the only one excited. We have worked together a long time. We've never actually talked to each other on the radio. So very big day. Well, it's an honor. But the bigger day in terms of world historic events is what just happened in Singapore. Scott and Elise, you're in Singapore. We have a lot to talk about, but let's start real quickly with this actual agreement that Kim Jong-un and President Trump signed earlier today.

What do we know about this agreement? Well, the president called it a pretty comprehensive document. I think people have mixed emotions about that. But it basically reaffirms Kim's commitment to denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula. It reaffirms Trump's commitment to provide security guarantees to North Korea in exchange for that denuclearization. It doesn't provide a lot in the way of detail about either of those moves. And it also just generally talks about, you know, sort of a new day, a new start, a new tone of relations between the United States and North Korea. Ayesha, President Trump often likes to talk about the fact that he's made history.

Never before has this been done. Oftentimes, it has been done many times before. This is the case where this is a first. This is a big moment. No president has met with the leader of North Korea before. This is a huge moment in American history. This is a huge moment for President Trump. This is something that he can truly say nobody else has ever done this.

And we will see what happens from that. But when you look at this moment, when you look at President Trump, who loves pageantry, who loves the art of the deal, this is something that he can point to and say, look, I was a statesman. I took America's message and met with the head of North Korea, which hasn't been done before. Elise, you've been in Seoul for several years now. You've covered missile tests. You've covered nuclear tests. You've covered fire and fury and Kim calling Trump a dotard. I mean, how remarkable is it that we've gone from those missile tests to this moment here where you have these two leaders talking to each other in the same room? It's quite a turnaround.

And the most optimistic take on this is that having engagement, having diplomacy happen, is the opposite of what we were seeing last fall and previously last summer, which was hostility, right? The real concern that we were at the nuclear brink. And so, so long as this diplomatic engagement is happening, you know, there is a sense of more peace on the Korean Peninsula. But what's disappointing to a lot of analysts who are watching and reading this deal is that the U.S. failed to really extract anything concrete from

North Korea, but gave North Korea a lot of significant concessions, or what North Korea would consider a win, and China and Russia would consider an endorsement of a frame and a way of thinking about Asia that they have long supported. So there's going to be a lot of work ahead on the details and the specifics that were left out of this very broad agreement. And we're going to talk about this at length in a little bit in the podcast. But just real quick, before we do that later on, Elise, what's the biggest thing that North Korea got out of this agreement and this meeting? North Korea and North Korean leaders, so Kim's father and grandfather,

have long been wanting a meeting with the U.S. president. It's just that the U.S. wasn't willing to provide that or willing to agree to that because it was considered such a gimme for the North Korean regime to be able to sort of have equal footing with the most powerful and richest nation on earth. So Trump accepting this and then standing side by side, having those flags, alternating U.S. and North Korean flags as a backdrop, and then sitting down and shaking hands and signing an agreement. All of the pageantry and the pomp and circumstance of this is huge for North Korea propaganda-wise. North Korean media has not yet reported on the outcome of the summit, but it has already shown images of Kim Jong-un being in Singapore

and taking a little sightseeing journey around Singapore, being treated as a normal world leader and not the despot and the leader of a pariah state that it previously had been considered. So a real turnaround for North Korea's brand, North Korea's image. And we can't forget that this is called an open prison by human rights groups. This is the most repressive regime on the planet. Its citizens have no freedom of movement, no freedom of religion, no freedom of speech,

no free access to information. And yet that's really largely getting forgotten in all of the pageantry of the summit today. And pageantry is the word for it. I mean, they met at this resort island off the southern tip of Singapore. And I dare say the script for the show that the two leaders put on today ran a whole lot longer and had a whole lot more detail than the actual agreement the two leaders signed. It started with Trump walking down this long red carpet from one end of this colonnade,

Kim walking the opposite direction. They came together in front of American flags and North Korean flags. There was a handshake, lots of camera clicks. There was even fights with the news media because the administration wanted to have more cameras than reporters on hand to record this event because what they really were all about were the optics, not the substance. And Scott, you at one point were one of a handful of reporters in the room with these two men. What was that like? What was the vibe you picked up on?

It was really positive. And, you know, when Elise talks about the criticism of North Korea, one of the chief critics until just a few months ago was Donald Trump. When he was in South Korea last fall, he gave a speech to the National Assembly where he really ripped apart North Korea's human rights record. He said nothing publicly while he was sitting side by side with Kim about that today. He did say in a news conference that he addressed the human rights record, the

dismal human rights record of North Korea briefly. But when he talked about Kim as he was sitting side by side with the North Korean leader, it was all praise. And it was a stark contrast, frankly, to the way the president's been describing some of America's traditional allies just in recent days after that, you know, very contentious G7 meeting. So, Elise, can you give us some context here? Because I think for a lot of listeners who have been reading the headlines but aren't following, you know, the day by day of the Korean peninsula. Like, how rare is it for Kim Jong-un to even be in another country to begin with, let alone being in the center of a world stage like this? Sure. So he took leadership of the regime in

December of 2011 after his father, Kim Jong-il, died. So from 2011 until the beginning of 2018, Kim Jong-un is known to not have left North Korea because he had to secure his domestic legitimacy. When you're a dictator, you know, there could be challenges to your power, right? Because you're not governing by the consent of the people. And so he, you know, waited all of these years. And then on January 1st of this year, made this pivot, made a pivot from madman or somebody who is called a madman and a despot to a statesman. And since January of this year, we've seen this flurry of diplomacy, you know, the North Korean delegation at the Winter Olympics, North Korea and South Korea coming together to join, to form a joint hockey team

at the same Olympics. And then now, just in the last two months, Kim Jong-un has met with the leader of China, Xi Jinping, twice. He's met with Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea, which is North Korea's traditional enemy, sworn enemy, really, even in a lot of its official documents. He's met with Moon Jae-in twice now in person, now the U.S. president, and has hosted Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, in Pyongyang. So this is just in the last two months Kim Jong-un has really turned up the diplomacy angle, and it's worked really well

for him. Scott, you were there for the signing of this agreement. Let's walk through everything we know about this agreement. I mean, the biggest thing is this promise of denuclearization. But as Elise has pointed out, that's something North Korea has agreed to before. And obviously, they still have nuclear weapons. What does this mean? How can it be accomplished? What was actually agreed to? Well, and it's a very vague promise. I mean, denuclearization has meant in the past different things to the United States and the North Koreans. Secretary of State Pompeo said they had made progress in the run-up to this meeting at sort of narrowing that gap, but he didn't offer any specifics, and there's certainly no detail about that narrowing of the gap in the

paper that we saw today. So what we have is a vague commitment by North Korea to work towards denuclearization, an equally vague commitment by the United States to ensure the security of North Korea, also a commitment from the North Koreans to work to help repatriate the remains of some American servicemen who were missing or killed in North Korea during the war. But nothing about a timetable for actually dismantling nuclear weapons, nothing about a verification process, nothing about even an inventory from North Korea of what they have, because that would obviously, if you're going to confirm that they've destroyed their nuclear program,

you have to know how big that program is. So none of that has been spelled out. Now, that's not to say it can't be spelled out in the future. But as Elise says, the United States has given a lot here, and there's not a lot of evidence that they've thus far gotten very much in return. Ayesha, there's a lot of stuff that Scott just said that sounds a whole lot like the Iran deal that President Trump has spent years criticizing. Yes. And President Trump, he wants this deal to be kind of looked at in contrast to the Iran nuclear deal. He brought up the Iran deal today. He's saying we haven't paid them a whole bunch of money like we did with the Iran deal to get our hostages back. And he's really making the case that he didn't really give much.

He's saying that the meeting, even though he met with Kim, he's saying that that was nothing for me. That was just this is just a trip to Singapore. And I met with him and that this could possibly save millions of lives. I think you could have lost 20 million people, 30 million people. This is really an honor for me to be doing this because I think, you know, potentially you could have lost, you know, 30, 40, 50 million people. The city of Seoul, one of the biggest cities in the world, is right next to the border. So he's making this argument that this is not like the Iran deal at all because he feels like the U.S. hasn't really given much and that with the agreements to stop testing and the agreements to commit to denuclearization and give the remains back of these soldiers and the hostages that were given back to the U.S., that the U.S. has gotten a lot.

So that is President Trump's position. Of course, there are people that disagree with that. Elise, I know one thing that you really reacted to and were surprised by, not from the agreement itself, but from Trump's press conference, was the statement that the U.S. is going to pause its war games, that Trump called them provocative. I mean, that's a really big deal. Can you explain how big of a deal this is and why this matters for South Korea, for the United States? Yes. Well, we went into the day expecting that the U.S. might extract some serious concessions

from North Korea, but the opposite happened by the end of the day, because what Trump revealed was that North Korea got a huge concession from the United States. It's not in the agreement, but Trump seems to have agreed to freeze or suspend the annual military exercises that the U.S. conducts along with South Korea in South Korea in every March and August. We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see that the future negotiation is not going along like it should. North Korea has long considered these exercises, where there are often live fire drills, to be provocative or provocations.

And just in the way that the U.S. calls missile tests provocations, North Korea considers the exercises rehearsals for invasion. And they've been going on for decades and decades. And all along, the U.S. and the South Koreans have said these are purely defensive in nature. We're just trying to maintain, you know, readiness because obviously the Korean War is technically not over. And North Korea should have no objection to this whatsoever.

Trump then today reveals that he takes the North Korea line, right, that he does consider that his own country and his own military's defensive exercises are provocative and agreed to suspend them, according to what he said to the press. Now, a suspension would be akin to what China and Russia have been proposing all along, which is that the U.S. frees its military exercises in exchange for North Korea freezing its nuclear testing or its missile testing. And so what the U.S. is now forced into is the Chinese or Russian frame of what should happen in Asia. And that reduces the commitment or it reduces the footprint of the U.S. on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia.

But I guess President Trump would say or supporters of President Trump might say, well, the U.S. needs to give something for North Korea to North Korea in order to get things in return. And that maybe the position that the U.S. has been taking for all these decades hasn't worked. So let's try something new. What do you I mean, what do you think about that? What did North Korea or what did North Korea concede? So there was no practical concession from North Korea here at all. It has previously committed to far more specific denuclearization steps than this general notion of complete denuclearization that showed up in the agreement today. It is also really committed to far more specific steps on all of the four points that were included in the declaration signed by Kim Jong-un and President Trump.

So it totally makes sense that in a negotiation that both sides have to give something. North Korea has given nothing. What about this missile engine test site thing? And is it significant? President Trump said that North Korea had agreed to destroy this missile engine test site. It's not in the deal, though. Is that significant that it's not not in the deal, though. Is that significant that it's not actually in the agreement spelled out? South Korean press and some government

officials have actually believed that that missile engine site, well, first of all, we don't know which specific missile engine launch pad that North Korea is even talking about or what President Trump was specifically talking about. But there is some question as to whether this is one that they've already dismantled or started blowing up. So it already started destroying something before Trump considered this kind of a new thing that he got from Kim Jong Un. The second part of this is that we don't really know the significance of what the regime is dismantling or rolling back unless there are independent outside inspectors allowed into the country. And North Korea has previously signed on to agreements that allowed for inspectors, actual

nuclear experts to go in. It did not go that far today. And so I guess President Trump was saying today that he looks at this as the beginning of a process. He says there will need to be more meetings and that there will be negotiations to kind of work out these details and work out, I guess, the specifics of what denuclearization will actually mean, inspectors, that these issues will be worked out at, I guess, at a later date. And that this is the start of it. Now, he did say he thinks things will happen quickly. He didn't give specific timetables, but he seems to or what the administration is saying is that this is the start and that they're going to move ahead from here. Well, you know, scientifically, I've been watching and reading a lot about this, and it does take a long time to, you know, pull off complete denuclearization.

It takes a long time. Scientifically, you have to wait certain periods of time and a lot of things happen. But despite that, once you start the process, it means it's pretty much over. You can't use them. That's the good news. And that's going to start very, very soon. I believe that's going to start very soon. We will do it as fast as it can mechanically and physically be done. One of the things that struck me was that toward the end of this, President Trump said that he could see himself going to North Korea.

He could see Kim Jong-un coming to Washington, D.C. I mean, what happens next? And Elise, you were talking about validation on the world stage. The idea that Kim Jong-un could fly into Washington, D.C., have an event in the White House lawn with North Korean flags. I mean, that would go a long way from what North Korea wants, right? To be fair, President Trump has said that, you know, a lot of the conditions would have to be right before that sort of thing happened. But he was open to it, which is also unprecedented from an American administration and an American foreign policy standpoint. But again, you know, the optimistic take here is that this is a real diplomatic opening. This is an opportunity to improve U.S. ties with North Korea that might lead to something that's better for the North Korean people.

Kim Jong-un is now focused on economic opening. And an economic opening could be an opportunity for North Koreans' standard of living to rise. And that's something that we all want to see because we don't want to see North Koreans living in abject poverty and under the repressive conditions of this current regime. Scott, what happens next for President Trump? Obviously, this was a huge week in terms of going to the G7 and beefing with Canada and France and our close allies,

then flying across the world and sitting down face to face with someone who's been with a country that's been an enemy of the United States for decades, somebody who we viewed as a dictator. What happens next on all of these fronts? That's a good question. You know, he's been sowing discord and trying to make peace within hours of each other and half a globe away. So he's heading back to Washington. He's actually going to be back in Washington earlier than initially anticipated because his staffers say this meeting went so quickly. And we'll see what he chooses to do next. Elise, since you've been in Seoul, you've had a president resign. You've had missile tests. You've had nuclear tests. You've had the Winter Olympics. How does this stack up with all of the

enormous stories that you've been covering and experiencing for us? Well, no question. It's the biggest yet, right? Certainly in my three and a half years in Seoul. And this is probably one of the biggest diplomatic stories that any of us will cover, largely because the US president is a larger than life figure. The North Korean dictator is a larger than life figure. And they came together on this day, ended up talking for several hours, establishing some chemistry. And whatever happens out of this in terms of actual pragmatic steps will determine whether this is meaningful or not. But it was significant in and of itself for them to meet. There are going to be ripples from this meeting for months and years and maybe decades, if not definitely days.

So we will definitely be talking about this the next time we're in your podcast feed. We are going to wrap it up for now. Elise, thank you for talking to us from Singapore. And thanks for coming on the podcast for the first time. So happy to be here. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Ayesha Roscoe.

I cover the White House. I'm Scott Horsley. I also cover the White House. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.