US Secretary of State to Travel to North Korea on October 7th
It looks like a Trump-Kim Summit Part 2 will be closer to happening with the announcement that Secretary of State Pompeo is making another trip to North Korea:
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will travel to North Korea next week to meet with its leader, Kim Jong-un, the State Department said Tuesday.
Pompeo will visit Pyongyang Sunday as the U.S. pushes to dismantle the regime’s nuclear weapons program and set up a second summit between President Donald Trump and Kim.
At their first summit in Singapore in June, Kim agreed to work toward “complete” denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in exchange for security guarantees from the U.S. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but if there is a second summit there is going to have to be major announcement that comes out of it and suspect it will be an agreement to end the Korean War which the ROK and North Korea have been wanting by the end of this year.
This rhetoric of ending the Korean War has been going on for months because the Kim regime wants the peace treaty because it then challenges the legitimacy of the military presence in South Korea. If there is peace why is USFK needed?
President Moon is saying all the right things that USFK will remain after any peace treaty is signed. Despite claims in the media that Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in want US troops to stay after any peace deal is reached, this is just all rhetoric to prevent energizing South Korean conservatives against Moon.
Remember Moon is a very skilled politician that needs to keep the Korean right at bay and public anxiety down. If he advocated openly for a USFK withdrawal that would give the South Korean right an issue to strongly attack him with and cause much public anxiety after decades of security guarantees provided by US forces. That is why I think the Moon administration will publicly say they support USFK staying, but will then have their surrogates do things to make life difficult for USFK.
If the US government decides to withdraw USFK in the future on their own accord then the Moon administration is able to get what it ultimately wanted without getting blamed for it.
