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Trump Grappling With Risks of Proceeding With North Korea Meeting

President Trump with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea in New York last year. Mr. Trump is scheduled to meet with Mr. Moon on Tuesday ahead of his scheduled summit meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in Singapore next month.Credit...Tom Brenner/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump, increasingly concerned that his summit meeting in Singapore next month with North Korea’s leader could turn into a political embarrassment, has begun pressing his aides and allies about whether he should take the risk of proceeding with a historic meeting that he had leapt into accepting, according to administration and foreign officials.

Mr. Trump was both surprised and angered by a statement issued on Wednesday by the North’s chief nuclear negotiator, who declared that the country would never trade away its nuclear weapons capability in exchange for economic aid, administration officials said. The statement, while a highly familiar tactic by the North, represented a jarring shift in tone after weeks of conciliatory gestures.

On Thursday and Friday, Mr. Trump peppered aides with questions about the wisdom of proceeding, and on Saturday night he called President Moon Jae-in of South Korea to ask why the North’s public statement seemed to contradict the private assurances that Mr. Moon had conveyed after he met Kim Jong-un, the 35-year-old dictator of the North, at the Demilitarized Zone in late April.

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Trump and North Korea Rebuff Bolton’s ‘Libya Model’

John Bolton, the national security adviser, says the dismantling of Libya’s nuclear weapons program provides a playbook for North Korean denuclearization. The idea is provoking a lot of resistance and confusion.

When North Korea threatened to back out of the nuclear summit with President Trump, they pointed the finger at one person — John Bolton — and blasted his calls for the so-called Libya model. Not even Bolton’s boss is happy with it. “Well, the Libyan model isn’t a model that we have at all.” So just what is Bolton’s so-called Libya model? It started in 2003, when Libya decided to dismantle its fledgling nuclear weapons program. The country even shipped parts to a warehouse in Tennessee. “These are aluminum vacuum tubes in which the centrifuge machinery themselves operate.” And according to John Bolton, it all went down in one fell swoop. No half-steps, no concessions. His take was that Muammar Qaddafi simply made a strategic calculation: Give up the nukes, and Libya would no longer be a global pariah — and avoid the fate of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. What actually happened with Libya is a matter of debate, but it became Bolton’s go-to model for how to disarm rogue states like North Korea. “Is it a requirement that Kim Jong-un agree to give away those weapons before you give any kind of concession?” “I think that’s right. I think we’re looking at the Libya model of 2003, 2004.” “The implementation of the decision means getting rid of all the nuclear weapons, dismantling them, taking them to Oak Ridge, Tenn.” Why is Bolton’s Libya model so offensive to North Korea? First, it’s a dig at the regime’s crowning achievement. As the official North Korea statement says, ‘It is absolutely absurd to compare North Korea, a nuclear state, to Libya, which had been at the initial state of nuclear development.’ It’s true that Libya was barely a nuclear startup. And North Korea actually has warheads, ballistic missiles and a vast network of labs and development sites. Second, North Korea calls Bolton’s model a “sinister move to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq.” A few years after Libya’s nukes were shipped to Tennessee, U.S.-backed airstrikes helped overthrow Qaddafi: a vivid reminder to Kim Jong-un of what happens to leaders who give up their defenses. So why is Bolton invoking a reference that’s clearly so inflammatory? There are some who speculate that Bolton is intentionally sabotaging the North Korea talks, just as he did in 2003, because he believes North Korea can’t be trusted. This is him on Fox News just a few weeks before becoming national security adviser. “Why in the world would they agree to not halt the program, to give it up completely? It just doesn’t logically make any sense.” “Because they’re lying. You know, there’s an all-purpose joke here. Question: How do you know that the North Korean regime is lying? Answer: Their lips are moving.” According to Bolton, this is their real goal. “They want to buy time. Three months, six months, 12 months, whatever it is they need to get across the finish line.” Bolton says this was part of his life as a pundit. Now his job is to help the president achieve his goals. Which by all measures seems to include cutting a historic deal with North Korea. It could be that Bolton simply believes the only way to prevent North Korea from playing games is to demand a Libya-style playbook. But what is clear is Bolton’s repeated talk about the Libya model is antagonizing the North — and now apparently the White House. “The Libyan model that was mentioned was a much different deal. This would be with Kim Jong-un something where he’d be there, he’d be in his country, he’d be running his country.”

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John Bolton, the national security adviser, says the dismantling of Libya’s nuclear weapons program provides a playbook for North Korean denuclearization. The idea is provoking a lot of resistance and confusion.CreditCredit...Tom Brenner/The New York Times

The president’s conversation with Mr. Moon, which was first reported by The Washington Post, came just three days before the South Korean leader was scheduled to arrive in Washington to meet with Mr. Trump on Tuesday. It was a sign of Mr. Trump’s discomfort, some officials speculated, that he could not wait to discuss the issue until Mr. Moon arrived for his meetings here, though there is no indication that the president is considering pulling out of the North Korea talks.

Mr. Trump’s aides have grown concerned that the president — who has said that “everyone thinks” he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts — has signaled that he wants the summit meeting too much. The aides also worry that Mr. Kim, sensing the president’s eagerness, is prepared to offer assurances that will fade over time.

Moreover, Mr. Trump’s decision this month to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal raises the stakes for the North Korea negotiation. If he emerges with anything less than what President Barack Obama got, which in Iran included the verified shipment of 97 percent of all nuclear material out of the country, it will be hard for Mr. Trump to convince anyone other than his base that the negotiation was a success.

The aides are also concerned about what kind of grasp Mr. Trump has on the details of the North Korea program, and what he must insist upon as the key components of denuclearization. Mr. Moon and his aides reported that Mr. Kim seemed highly conversant with all elements of the program when the two men met, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made similar comments about Mr. Kim, based on his two meetings with him in Pyongyang, the North’s capital.

But aides who have recently left the administration say Mr. Trump has resisted the kind of detailed briefings about enrichment capabilities, plutonium reprocessing, nuclear weapons production and missile programs that Mr. Obama and President George W. Bush regularly sat through.

Grappling with North Korea in negotiations is a new experience not just for Mr. Trump, but also for everyone else in the upper ranks of his administration. South Korean officials say that John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s new national security adviser, has been in near daily contact with his counterpart in Seoul, trying to work out a strategy.

Mr. Bolton has been clear that in his view the president should use the Singapore meeting to declare that the North must give up its entire arsenal and nuclear infrastructure before crippling economic sanctions are eased.

The South has been advocating a more traditional confidence-building approach, in which concessions by the North result in a gradual lifting of sanctions. But Mr. Trump has said he will not repeat that technique, because it led to failure by his four immediate predecessors.

Until now, administration officials have been saying they expect Mr. Kim to agree to denuclearization at the Singapore summit meeting and to set a schedule for a fast down payment over the next six months, which would involve turning over some number of nuclear weapons, closing production facilities and allowing inspectors to range the country.

Those who have dealt with North Korea most intensively say that expectation will have to be scaled back if Mr. Trump expects success.

“If Trump is truly expecting to see a handover of nuclear weapons in six months, without anything in return, that is very unrealistic,” said Joseph Yun, the State Department’s North Korea coordinator until he retired a few months ago. He predicted that Mr. Trump would be forced into the kind of step-by-step measures that his predecessors attempted, “because there is no other way.”

Mr. Pompeo said on ABC News late last month: “This administration has its eyes wide open. We know the history. We know the risks.” He said the only measure of success would be “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization,” a phrase first used in the Bush administration, for which it proved unattainable.

Analysts at the C.I.A., where Mr. Pompeo was director before becoming secretary of state, have warned for years that they do not believe that Mr. Kim would trade away all of his nuclear weapons capability, no matter what the offer from the United States and its allies. But they have said there was a chance that he would suspend testing and give up some of the North’s capability — as long as it could be rapidly rebuilt — if he could win the removal of much of the American presence in the region.

Mr. Bolton has repeatedly cited the case of Libya, which turned over all of its nuclear-related equipment in 2003, as a model to follow for denuclearization. Libya received promises of economic integration with the West, little of which happened.

In 2011, its leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, was overthrown, dragged from a ditch and killed. The North Koreans noticed, and much of the statement issued last week was a denunciation of Mr. Bolton and a vow never to bend to “great powers” seeking a similar deal.

But when reporters asked Mr. Trump about Libya, he managed, in one stroke, to contradict Mr. Bolton and misconstrue the importance of the trade of the nuclear program for economic rewards.

“The Libyan model isn’t a model that we have at all, when we’re thinking of North Korea,” Mr. Trump said. “If you look at that model with Qaddafi, that was a total decimation. We went in there to beat him.” That referred to Western military intervention in 2011, not to the nuclear disarmament that came eight years before.

“Now that model would take place if we don’t make a deal, most likely,” Mr. Trump warned, seeming to repeat exactly the threat that the North Koreans had warned against. “But if we make a deal, I think Kim Jong-un is going to be very, very happy.”

Mr. Trump may be right: Mr. Kim presumably has many decades ahead of him as North Korea’s leader and has much to gain from improved economic conditions. But he would be betting his entire country on any nuclear deal, and most intelligence analyses in recent years have cast doubt that he, or the North Korean elite, would be willing to give up the security provided by nuclear arms.

Michael Green, a professor at Georgetown University and a leading expert on Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in Foreign Affairs that Mr. Kim was looking for something much larger than Mr. Trump was.

“Trump may be preparing for the wrong game: a two-player round of checkers when Kim is steeling for a multiplayer two-board chess match,” he wrote. “On one board will be the future of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs, what Trump came to negotiate. On the other will be what Kim and the other participants know is also crucially at stake: the future of geopolitics in northeast Asia.” Mr. Kim sees himself as a player in that game long after the Trump administration is over.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Weighs the Risk of Talks After a North Korean Reversal. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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