<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
SEOUL \u2014 President Trump\u2019s determination to undermine the Iran nuclear deal could undercut his hopes for quick success in the upcoming summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, many in South Korea fear.<\/p>\n
Former high-level South Korean officials and analysts say Mr. Kim will be far less likely to abandon his nuclear and missile programs if the U.S. pulls out of the 2015 multilateral agreement meant to curb Tehran\u2019s nuclear programs in exchange for relief from international economic sanctions.<\/p>\n
Mr. Kim plans a one-on-one summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on April 27 and is set to meet Mr. Trump next month or in early June at a still-to-be-determined location. The Trump administration has said the goal of the high-risk meeting will be to get the North to agree to eventually give up its nuclear programs.<\/p>\n
But the prospect of a U.S. pullout from the Iran deal casts a shadow over the talks.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>\u201cIt will have a very negative influence on North Korea\u2019s decision of whether or not to come out with a strong denuclearization statement or to make any serious concessions during a summit with President Trump,\u201d said Paik Hak-soon, a top North Korea analyst with the Sejong Institute think tank in the South.<\/p>\n The Iran agreement and the Korean Peninsula talks \u201care quite closely connected in the perception of the North Korean leadership,\u201d Mr. Paik said in an interview. \u201cTrashing the Iran deal will have a very souring effect.\u201d<\/p>\n Many here see Mr. Trump\u2019s appointment of John R. Bolton as his national security adviser, a sharp critic of the Obama administration\u2019s Iran deal and a past proponent of regime change in Iran, as an indication that Washington is bent on pulling fully out of the accord.<\/p>\n Under the Iran deal\u2019s terms, U.S., China, Russia, Britain and France gave billions of dollars in sanctions relief to Iran in exchange for sharp curbs and intrusive inspections of Tehran\u2019s nuclear programs.<\/p>\n Other signatories to the deal say they want to preserve it, but Iranian officials have said they will not be bound by the nuclear restrictions if the U.S. says it no longer is part of the agreement.<\/p>\n Mr. Trump decertified the Iran deal as in the U.S. national interest in October \u2014 a mainly rhetorical step that sets the stage for a full withdrawal. Critics of the agreement say Iran has violated the letter and the spirit of the deal by testing a string of long-range ballistic missiles and continuing to threaten Israel and U.S. Sunni Arab allies in the region through a network of proxy forces such as Lebanon\u2019s Hezbollah.<\/p>\n The president has issued an ultimatum to Britain, France and Germany. If they don\u2019t join Washington in fixing \u201cterrible flaws\u201d in the deal, Mr. Trump said, he will move to unilaterally reimpose U.S. sanctions on Iran by May 12, the next deadline for him to renew sanctions relief that Washington has been giving Iran for the past three years. There has been little indication of progress on a revised deal with exactly a month to go.<\/p>\n State Department Policy Planning Director Brian Hook told reporters last month that the goal is to get the Europeans to agree to collective new sanctions against Iran if it tests long-range missiles or evades inspections of its remaining nuclear facilities.<\/p>\n Echoes across Asia<\/strong><\/p>\n But the Iran debate is having clear echoes on the other side of Asia as Mr. Trump pursues his \u201cdeal on the de-nuking of North Korea.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI see a very close correlation with the Iran agreement, and I am concerned that if the agreement is not [upheld], it will have an impact on the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula,\u201d said retired South Korean Army Lt. Gen. Chun In-bum, an analyst on the North Korean threat.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s going to make the negotiations between the United States and North Korea more difficult,\u201d said Jun Bong-geun, the head of security and unification studies at the Korea National Diplomatic Academy in Seoul. \u201cNorth Korea may want more assurances from Washington, and they may want to hide more.<\/p>\n \u201cIt might send a message that if changing administrations can change a deal, what does that mean for [Pyongyang]? It will probably make it harder for the North Koreans to trust a deal with the U.S.,\u201d Gen.\u00a0Chun said in an interview.<\/p>\n The Moon government has remained mum on the Iran issue, but one former official told The Times that there \u201cdefinitely is concern\u201d inside the administration.<\/p>\n Given the skepticism Mr. Trump and his advisers have about Iran\u2019s compliance, the bar may be even higher for Mr. Kim. U.S. security officials say North Korea has routinely violated international accords meant to stop it from obtaining nuclear weapons and the missiles to hit the U.S. and its East Asian allies.<\/p>\n The Trump administration has indicated that denuclearization \u2014 not just a declaration by Pyongyang but verifiable abandonment of the nuclear program \u2014 is a precondition for negotiations toward lifting sanctions on North Korea.<\/p>\n Uncertainty looms, however, over the administration\u2019s game plan for the Trump-Kim summit.<\/p>\n Just days after he was appointed as national security adviser last month, Mr. Bolton told Radio Free Asia that the administration should follow the \u201cLibyan Model\u201d with North Korea. The George W. Bush administration struck a relatively quick deal in December 2003 with Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi to give up his nuclear materials in exchange for sanctions relief and the promise of normalized relations with the West.<\/p>\n But South Korean sources say the mention of Libya likely angered Pyongyang, which has long pointed to Gadhafi\u2019s death at the hands of U.S.-backed rebels during the 2011 Arab Spring as an example of why a smaller state should never surrender its nuclear arsenal.<\/p>\n \u201cWe all know the Gadhafi case is something the North Koreans point to repeatedly to demonstrate that their behavior will not be decided by anybody, let alone by the United States, the way Gadhafi\u2019s was,\u201d said Mr. Paik. \u201cAnd I think you can compare the collapse of the Iran deal, if America pulls out of it, to the Gadhafi case.\u201d<\/p>\n If Mr. Trump keeps the U.S. in the Iran deal, however, \u201cthe North Koreans could more comfortably come to the table with the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBolton clearly has a very narrow view of the Libya case,\u201d said the former official, who spoke on background with The Times, arguing that the U.S.-Libya detente in 2006 depended heavily on the involvement of Britain as an intermediary and that no such intermediary exists vis-a-vis the potential U.S.-North Korean negotiations.<\/p>\n The uncertainty, many here say, means that the fate of any Trump-Kim summit will depend heavily on what comes from a summit between Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon.<\/p>\n Mr. Paik believes one of Mr. Moon\u2019s goals may be to get such a statement from Mr. Kim on denuclearization. At a minimum, he said, Mr. Moon is \u201ctrying to persuade Kim Jong-un with maximum effort to keep his commitment to denuclearize when he comes to the U.S.-North Korea summit talks.\u201d<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" President Trump’s determination to undermine the Iran nuclear deal could undercut his hopes for quick success in the upcoming summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, many in South Korea fear. SEOUL \u2014 President Trump\u2019s determination to undermine the Iran nuclear deal could undercut his hopes for quick success in the upcoming summit with North […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2824,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[264,472,322,367,34],"class_list":["post-2823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-worlds","tag-donald-trump","tag-kim-jong","tag-kim-jong-un","tag-moon-jae","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pornvas.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}