NORTH KOREA/NUCLEAR/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The vibes surrounding President Donald Trump’s planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are pretty good at the moment, and good vibes are better than bad ones. But here is the tougher underlying reality. Even a successful summit is likely to mark merely the start of prolonged and difficult negotiations with North Korea. And at the end, Mr. Trump could well come face-to-face with the same agonizing question looming ever since Pyongyang first tested a nuclear device: Will the U.S. be content merely to contain a nuclear North Korea and deter it from ever using the bomb it now possesses?…The strong implication is that this is what Mr. Kim means when he says he is willing to discuss “denuclearization”—that is, he means freezing his nuclear program where it is now, in return for immediate relief from international economic sanctions. That, of course, isn’t what the U.S. means when it says its goal is denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula; Washington interprets that to mean complete elimination of the North Korean nuclear-weapons program. A meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un could be a diplomatic breakthrough, but both men are nothing if not unpredictable.”
-Gerald F. Seib, “The Agonizing Question at the Heart of North Korean Diplomacy,” The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2018 10:12 am