US demonstrating readiness to move towards normalization of relations with North Korea - expert

MOSCOW, July 1. /TASS/. Sunday’s meeting between the US and North Korean leaders, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, has outlined orienting points for further movement towards settling the Korean Peninsula problem, Georgy Toloraya, director of the Russian Asian Strategy Center at the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Economics, told TASS on Monday. During his visit to South Korea on June 30, Trump visited the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on the border with North Korea where he met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Trump became the first incumbent US president to set foot on North Korea’s soil. The talks between the US president and the North Korean leader lasted for about an hour. Trump took the initiative and managed to have the meeting be organized in quite a short period of time, the expert noted. "It was quite a good choice as there was no other opportunity to meet with Kim Jong-un in the foreseeable future," he said. "Although the meeting was organized as a theatrical production and worked for Trump’s image as a politician and diplomat in the light of the presidential campaign in 2020, it nevertheless had a substantive meaning," Toloraya noted. "The world order now is falling apart, with more creative endeavor and initiatives needed to find compromise solutions." "The meeting has reversed the momentum and brought the negotiating process out of the dead end it has been trapped in after the Hanoi summit on February 28 2019, when the sides placed excessive demands on each other," the expert said. "Up till the moment of the two leaders’ meeting, the entire negotiating team and the entire government machinery in the two states had been in a deadlock that could have entailed more tensions and dramatic developments at the end of the current year." The situation, according to Toloraya, was reversed in just 30 minutes of the conversation. "Most likely, the two leaders agreed basic ways and orienting points for further movement on the negotiating track," he said. "The most important thing is that the United States has actually admitted that its all-at-once-and-welfare-in-exchange approach is nonviable and has accepted the necessity to continue stage-by-stage movement." He said he was sure the United States would be ready to move towards political normalizations and would probably lift a number of sanctions against North Korea. "What matters most now is that the process has started and yielded some positive tendencies towards the solution of the Korean Peninsula problem," he stressed. This situation, in his words, is comfortable for Russia. "It is important for Moscow that the process has kicked off, without tensions and the goal - to get back to the nonproliferation regime - being set," Toloraya said. Trump and Kim Jong-un held the first ever U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore in 2018. The meeting yielded a joint document where Pyongyang, committed itself to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in exchange for security guarantees from Washington. The two leaders had their second meeting on February 27-28, 2019 in Hanoi. After a series of meetings, including one-on-one, Trump and Kim Jong-un were unable to come to an agreement and did not sign any joint documents. Read more