Incoming U.S. President Donald Trump should send an oral message to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il shortly after taking office to propose a preparatory meeting between the two countries in a first step toward reopening formal denuclearization negotiations, a U.S. expert suggested Wednesday.
Joel Wit, a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University's US-Korea Institute and founder of the website 38 North, made the suggestion in a policy recommendations report to the Trump administration, saying negotiations with Pyongyang offer the best chance to resolve the issue.
The report came after Wit held three days of meetings with senior North Korean diplomats in Geneva last month.
According to his ideal "game plan," the incoming secretaries of state and defense should first announce the new administration's willingness to resume negotiations with the North, which should be followed by Trump's call to leaders of South Korea, Japan and China to explain his intentions.
Then should come "an oral message from President Trump to Kim Jong-un drawing from principles expressed in past joint statements, proposing that representatives meet at the earliest possible date to review the current situation and to advance ideas for moving forward with talks and inviting a response," Wit said in the report.
The message should be "passed directly to the North rather than through Beijing," he said.
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(Yonhap) |
The game plan also envisions a first meeting between the two sides taking place in the beginning of February, the U.S. and South Korea then announcing a decision to modify or scale back joint military exercises and the North announcing a moratorium on its nuclear and missile tests.
By the end of February, the two sides could hold a second preparatory session before formal negotiations resume and Trump sends "a letter" to the North leader noting U.S. and North Korean security concerns and the need for bold moves on both sides," according to the game plan.
It also envisions U.N. nuclear inspectors returning to the North by mid-March.
"A strategy of coercive diplomacy, focused initially on aggressive and sustained diplomacy to secure phased denuclearization, offers the best prospects for success," Wit said in the report. "If this effort fails, Washington would significantly escalate pressure commensurate with the severity of North Korean actions."
The former State Department negotiator with Pyongyang said there are two other policy options on the North -- an Iran-style campaign to impose crippling sanctions to force Pyongyang back to the negotiating table, and preemptive military strikes -- but they are unlikely to work.
A successful policy could lead to a number of positive developments, including halting the development of the North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile and hydrogen bomb, sending International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors back to the North's nuclear facilities, and restarting inter-Korean military talks, he said.
"There are risks to both action and inaction, but the dangers posed by North Korea are so great that the United States cannot afford to ignore the problem," Wit said. "A new policy that tries negotiations first and then puts pressure on the North if its intransigence scuttles diplomacy, is still no guarantee of success, but is the most promising choice from a menu of very bad options." (Yonhap)
