Michael Breen Discusses Status of US-North Korea Denuclearization Talks
Here is what well known author and Korea expert Michael Breen has to say about the current efforts to denuclearize North Korea by the Trump administration:
What does North Korea want? North Korea’s leaders may be rational and consistent, but they are opaque, which leads to a lot of guessing about them. One certainty is that they want sanctions lifted. After that, it becomes unclear. Possibility number one is that they want to come in out of the cold, develop their economy and that for this they are prepared to destroy their known nuclear weapons and facilities, but retain the potential to re-arm.
Korea Times
Another possibility is that they plan no real change and are approaching Trump from a risk management perspective. If that is the case, they might serve up a missile launch when Trump announces his plan for re-election. A third possibility is that they still want to unify the peninsula on their own terms and see nuclear weapons as integral to this aim.
These possibilities are not mutually exclusive. But they have one thing in common ― there is a role for nuclear weapons. A fourth possibility ― that North Korea wants to give up being a nuclear power and return to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with its tail between its legs ― would be nice, but appears to be the least favored by analysts.
It is precisely because it is this last scenario that the U.S. is pushing for that suggests the talks may well fail. I hope I am wrong, but the answer to our question of whether Trump is failing may well be, no, not yet.
You can read more at the link, but I think it is pretty clear what North Korea wants. First of all they want to keep their nuclear weapons not as a deterrent, but instead to unify the Korean peninsula. Remember their artillery threat on Seoul has been enough of deterrent to prevent a US attack on North Korea for decades. Remember the Kim regime has killed many American troops over the decades with no US counterattack because of this artillery threat.
So clearly the expense and political capital they have put into their nuclear weapons program is intended to give them a military advantage over South Korea. This will all factor into the future confederation that the Kim regime wants to establish with South Korea that they can use their nuclear weapons to help extort the ROK to implement once the US-ROK alliance is ended.
This is why the Kim regime wants “Pretend Denuclearization” in return for dropping sanctions, followed by a peace treaty that would ultimately lead to a US troop withdrawal to make the Confederation under North Korea’s terms fall into place.
