SEOUL: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un offered to give up his nuclear arsenal if America guaranteed his regime would survive, former South Korean president Moon Jae-in said in a recently released memoir.
Moon, who led South Korea for five years from 2017, was instrumental in brokering two high-profile summit meetings between Kim and then-United States president Donald Trump, aimed at securing Pyongyang’s denuclearization in return for sanctions relief.
But after the second summit collapsed in 2019, diplomatic outreach was abandoned, with relations between the two Koreas now at one of their worst points in years, as Kim doubles down on weapons production and draws closer to ally Moscow.
In the memoir released Friday, titled “From the Periphery to the Center,” former president Moon outlined in great detail his interactions with the North Korean leader.
“Kim said he would forsake nuclear weapons if there was a guarantee of regime survival,” Moon said in the book, adding that he felt the young North Korean leader was “very honest.”
According to Moon, Kim’s reasoning was: “I have a daughter and I do not wish her generation to live with nuclear weapons... Why would we continue to live in difficulty, under sanctions, with nuclear weapons if our security can be guaranteed?“
But the North Korean leader was “well aware of mistrust from the international community and the (belief from the) US that the North had been lying” about its commitments to denuclearization, Moon said.
Kim specifically asked him how the North could manage to “make Washington believe in our sincerity” to disarm.
In five years since the Hanoi summit, Pyongyang has declared itself an “irreversible” nuclear weapons power, accelerated weapons development, branded Seoul its “principal enemy” and threatened war over “even 0.001 mm” of territorial infringement.
It has also moved closer to Moscow, purportedly supplying it with arms in exchange for space technologies, something which would violate rafts of United Nations sanctions on both countries.
Despite how things have played out, Moon said in his memoir that he still believed Kim was sincere in his plans to denuclearize, but that it was strongly contingent on “corresponding measures” from the US.
Kim and Trump failed to strike a deal because Washington demanded complete denuclearization before it would consider providing sanctions relief, Moon wrote.
“In retrospect, I regret that (South Korea) did not mediate more effectively by listening to the North’s demands and relaying them to Washington if deemed reasonable,” he said.
“Though there are negative views about Trump, he was a very good fit for me as a counterpart in alliance diplomacy,” he said.
“While there are assessments that he is rude and harsh, I liked him for his honesty. A person who has a smiling face but acts differently and thus can’t be read is more difficult to deal with,” he added.
Trump was both apologetic and regretful that the Hanoi summit ended without a deal, Moon wrote.
Trump was “willing to accept (the North Koreans’ terms) but then-Security Adviser John Bolton fervently opposed it,” Moon wrote.
When Trump asked then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for a second opinion, he agreed with Bolton, leaving Trump no option but to walk away, Moon wrote.
It is impossible to take Kim’s words at face value now, Hong Min a senior analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, said.
What was clear “is that Kim tried to change the status quo by expressing his intention to denuclearize,” he said.
The only way to know if Kim was serious, would have been to strike a deal in Hanoi and “gauge how far the North would go toward denuclearization,” he added.
Moon was succeeded by conservative Yoon Suk Yeol, who has taken a significantly more hawkish stance on North Korea.
Yoon has not commented on the memoir but his minister for unification Kim Yung-ho said on Monday that taking Kim’s words at face value could have lead to a security-related “miscalculation.”
“While ignoring North Korea’s (nuclear) capability, if we only focus on the North’s intentions, this could result in a miscalculation of the security situation,” he said, according to the Yonhap news agency.
North Korea’s Kim was ‘sincere’ in Trump talks: Seoul’s former president Moon
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North Korea’s Kim was ‘sincere’ in Trump talks: Seoul’s former president Moon
- Former South Korean president Moon Jae-in was instrumental in brokering two high-profile summit meetings between Kim Jong Un and then-US president Donald Trump
Passenger plane catches fire at South Korean airport. All 176 people on board are evacuated
- A passenger plane has caught fire before takeoff at an airport in South Korea, but all 176 people on board have been safely evacuated
- The National Fire Agency says that three people suffered minor injuries, likely bruises, during the evacuation
The Airbus plane operated by South Korean airline Air Busan was preparing to leave for Hong Kong when its rear parts caught fire at Gimhae International Airport in the southeast, the Transport Ministry said in a statement.
The plane’s 169 passengers, six crewmembers and one engineer were evacuated using an escape slide, the ministry said.
The National Fire Agency said in a release that three people suffered minor injuries during the evacuation. The fire agency said the fire was completely put out at 11:31 p.m., about one hour after it deployed firefighters and fire trucks at the scene.
The cause of the fire wasn’t immediately known. The Transport Ministry said the plane is an A321 model.
Tuesday’s incident came a month after a Jeju Air passenger plane crashed at Muan International Airport in southern South Korea, killing all but two of the 181 people on board. It was one of the deadliest disasters in South Korea’s aviation history.
The Boeing 737-800 skidded off the airport’s runaway on Dec. 29 after its landing gear failed to deploy, slamming into a concrete structure and bursting into flames. The flight was returning from Bangkok and all of the victims were South Koreans except for two Thai nationals.
The first report on the crash released Monday said authorities have confirmed traces of bird strikes in the plane’s engines, though officials haven’t determined the cause of the accident.
North Korean leader Kim inspects nuclear facility as Pyongyang pressures Trump administration
- The visit comes as North Korea ramps up pressure on the US following the inauguration of US President Donald Trump earlier this month
- Kim’s moves suggest a continued emphasis on an expansion of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal
SEOUL: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has inspected a facility that produces nuclear material and called for bolstering the country’s nuclear capability, state media reported Wednesday, as the North looks to increase pressure on the United States following the inauguration of US President Donald Trump.
Kim’s visit suggests a continued emphasis on an expansion of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, though Trump has said he’s willing to talk to Kim again to revive diplomacy. Many analysts view North Korean weapons moves as part of a strategy to win diplomatic talks with Washington that could result in aid and political concessions.
The official Korean Central News Agency reported that Kim visited the nuclear-material production base and the Nuclear Weapons Institute. It didn’t say where those facilities are located, but North Korean photos of Kim’s visit indicated that he likely visited a uranium-enrichment facility that he went to last September. That visit was North Korea’s first disclosure of a uranium-enrichment facility since it showed one to visiting American scholars in 2010.
During the latest visit, Kim praised scientists and others for “producing weapons-grade nuclear materials and in strengthening the nuclear shield of the country.”
On Sunday, North Korea said it tested a cruise missile system, its third known weapons display this year, and vowed “the toughest” response to what it called the escalation of US-South Korean military drills.
North Korea views US military training with South Korea as invasion rehearsals, though Washington and Seoul have repeatedly said their drills are defensive in nature. In recent years, the United States and South Korea have expanded their military exercises in response to North Korea’s advancing nuclear program.
The start of Trump’s second term raises prospects for the revival of diplomacy between the United States and North Korea, as Trump met Kim three times during his first term. The Trump-Kim diplomacy in 2018-19 fell apart due to wrangling over US-led economic sanctions on North Korea.
During a Fox News interview broadcast Thursday, Trump called Kim “a smart guy” and “not a religious zealot.” Asked whether he will reach out to Kim again, Trump replied, “I will, yeah.”
Many experts say Kim likely thinks he has greater bargaining power than in his earlier round of diplomacy with Trump because of his country’s enlarged nuclear arsenal and deepening military ties with Russia.
After talking tough during campaign, Trump appears to ease up on China at start of presidency
- Trump appears to be seeking a more nuanced relationship with the country that both Republicans and Democrats have come to see as the gravest foreign policy challenge to the US
WASHINGTON: On the campaign trail last year, President Donald Trump talked tough about imposing tariffs as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and threatened to renew the trade war with China that he launched during his first term.
But now that he’s back in the White House, Trump appears to be seeking a more nuanced relationship with the country that both Republicans and Democrats have come to see as the gravest foreign policy challenge to the US China is also a major trading partner and an economic powerhouse, and it has one of the world’s largest military forces.
“We look forward to doing very well with China and getting along with China,” Trump said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in comments that suggested Beijing could help end the war in Ukraine and reduce nuclear arms.
As he moves forward with plans to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico on Feb. 1, Trump has not set a firm date for China. He’s only repeated his plan for a much lower 10 percent tax on Chinese imports in retaliation for China’s production of chemicals used in fentanyl. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump was “very much still considering” raising tariffs on China on Feb. 1.
Trump, who spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping days before taking office, seems to be showing restraint and bowing to a more complicated reality than he described while running for office. Speaking of potential tariffs on China in a recent Fox News interview, he said: “They don’t want them, and I’d rather not have to use it.”
Liu Yawei, senior adviser on China at the Carter Center in Atlanta, said Trump has become “more pragmatic.”
“The signaling, at least from the election to the inauguration, seems to be more positive than has been expected before,” Liu said. “Hopefully, this positive dynamic can be preserved and continued. Being more pragmatic, less ideological will be good for everyone.”
A Chinese expert on American foreign policy acknowledged that there are many “uncertainties and unknowns about the future” of US-China relations. But Da Wei, director of the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, also said Trump’s recent change in tone offers “encouraging signals.”
In his first term, warm relations were followed by a trade war
When Trump first became president in 2017, Xi and Trump got off to a good start. Xi was invited to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. A few months later, he treated Trump to a personal tour of the Palace Museum in the heart of Beijing, only to see Trump launch the trade war the following year.
The US-China relationship soured further over the COVID-19 pandemic, and it hardly improved during President Joe Biden’s administration, which saw a controversial visit to the self-governing island of Taiwan by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a Chinese spy balloon aloft over US territory.
Biden kept Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods and intensified the economic and technological rivalry with export controls, investment curbs and alliance building.
Now it will be up to Trump’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to help chart a new path for the second term.
During his confirmation hearing, Rubio said China has “lied, cheated, hacked and stolen” its way to global superpower status “at our expense.” He called China “the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.”
Hours after he was sworn in, Rubio met foreign ministers from Australia, Japan and India, sending signals that he would continue to work with the same group of countries that Biden elevated to blunt China’s expanding influence and aggression in the Indo-Pacific region.
Yet Rubio, who was twice sanctioned by Beijing and is known for his hawkish views on the Chinese Communist Party, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the US should engage with China because “it’s in the interest of global peace and stability.”
In a Friday phone call, China’s veteran foreign minister issued a veiled warning to Rubio, telling him to behave. Wang Yi conveyed the message in their first conversation since Rubio’s confirmation.
“I hope you will act accordingly,” Wang told Rubio, according to a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement that included a Chinese phrase typically used by a teacher or a boss warning a student or employee to be responsible for their actions. Rubio agreed to manage bilateral relations in a “mature and prudent” way, the ministry said.
Members of Congress have noted Trump’s seemingly softer attitude toward Beijing.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, wants to ensure “that Trump does not let China off too easy.” She urged the president to act now on measures that have won broad bipartisan support, including closing a tariff loophole on low-value packages, reviewing outbound investments and setting up a domestic industrial policy agenda.
Beijing seeks opportunities and stays ready to play tough
Beijing is seeking opportunities to create more breathing room in its relations with a US president known for his transactional style. Chinese leaders are betting on engaging with Trump directly when his Cabinet members and advisers appear to hold clashing views.
Trump “is the most important person above all those different voices, and he can at least set the tone of future policy,” Da said.
The Tsinghua professor expects Trump and Xi to meet at some point. Effective communication channels will be crucial, Da said, to keep differences from spiraling out of control, as they did in Trump’s first term.
“The two presidents can have a good starting point. That’s very important,” he said. “But then we need to set up some mechanisms to let the cabinet-level members talk to each other.”
That may explain Beijing’s friendly overture at the start of the second Trump administration. In response to Trump’s inauguration invitation, Xi sent a special representative.
Beijing has also signaled a willingness to be flexible on the future of TikTok, which Trump sought to ban during his first administration. But he has now come to the social media app’s rescue, offering more time for its Chinese-based parent company to sell and downplaying TikTok’s national security risks.
After Trump said he preferred not to use tariffs on China, the Chinese Foreign Ministry echoed that trade and economic cooperation between the two countries are mutually beneficial.
But Beijing is also ready to play tough, if necessary, after learning a lesson from Trump’s first term.
Over the past several years, Beijing has adopted laws and rules that allow it to retaliate quickly and forcefully to any hostile act from the US In its toolbox are tariffs, import curbs, export controls, sanctions, measures to limit companies from doing business in China and regulatory reviews aimed at inflicting pain on American businesses and the US economy.
Miles Yu, director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute, said Trump is now “more nuanced, and more focused, toward China.”
“He’s keeping his eyes on the prize, which is to maintain US supremacy without risking open and avoidable confrontation with China, while perfectly willing to walk away from the negotiation table and play the hardball,” Yu said.
Harvey Weinstein due in court as judge weighs scope of his #MeToo retrial and when it will start
- Judge Curtis Farber is expected to decide Wednesday when the disgraced movie mogul’s #MeToo retrial will start
- He will also decide whether it will include an allegation involving a woman who wasn’t in the original case
NEW YORK: Harvey Weinstein is due back in court Wednesday as a judge is set to decide when the disgraced movie mogul’s #MeToo retrial will start and whether it will include an allegation involving a woman who wasn’t in the original case.
Weinstein, 72, wants the extra charge thrown out, arguing through lawyers that Manhattan prosecutors only brought it to bolster their case with a third accuser after New York’s highest court overturned his 2020 conviction on rape and sexual assault charges involving two women.
Judge Curtis Farber is expected to rule on that and other matters, including the trial date — a task that’s been complicated by an increasingly crowded court calendar.
Weinstein’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, is representing conservative strategist Steve Bannon in a border wall fraud trial that’s set to start March 4 before a different Manhattan judge. Meanwhile, Farber has a murder trial in March.
Before Bannon’s trial date was set last week, Aidala had suggested that Weinstein’s trial go first in “the interest of humanity,” citing the ex-studio boss’ declining health.
Weinstein is being treated for numerous medical conditions, including chronic myeloid leukemia and diabetes.
“They know that Mr. Weinstein is dying of cancer and is an innocent man right now in the state of New York,” Aidala argued in court last week. He pleaded to prosecutors: “Can I try this dying man’s case first?”
Weinstein is being retried on charges that he forcibly performed oral sex on a movie and TV production assistant in 2006 and raped an aspiring actor in 2013. The additional charge, filed last September, alleges he forced oral sex on a different woman at a Manhattan hotel in 2006.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office said in court papers that the woman, who has not been identified publicly, came forward to prosecutors just days before the start of Weinstein’s first trial but was not part of that case.
Prosecutors said they did not pursue the women’s allegations after Weinstein was convicted and sentenced to 23 years in prison, but they revisited them and secured a new indictment after the state’s Court of Appeals threw out his conviction last April.
Farber ruled in October to combine the new indictment and existing charges into one trial.
Weinstein’s lawyers contend that prosecutors prejudiced him by waiting nearly five years to bring the additional charge, suggesting they had elected not to include the allegation in his first trial so they could use it later if his conviction were reversed.
Prosecutors called that thinking “absurd,” countering that Weinstein’s lawyers would have also been outraged if he had been charged based on the third woman’s allegation either during his first trial or immediately after his conviction.
Weinstein “would likely have characterized that timing as a vindictive and gratuitous pile-on,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing last month.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office said the previously uncharged allegation “required a sensitive investigation” and serious contemplation before seeking an indictment, in part because there are no eyewitnesses to the alleged assault and no scientific or other physical evidence.
Weinstein co-founded the film and television production companies Miramax and The Weinstein Company and was once one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, having produced films such as “Pulp Fiction” and “The Crying Game.”
In 2017, he became the most prominent villain of the #MeToo movement, which erupted when women began going public with accounts of his behavior.
He has long maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.
In vacating Weinstein’s conviction, the Court of Appeals ruled that the trial judge, James M. Burke, unfairly allowed testimony against him based on allegations from other women that were not part of the case. Burke is no longer on the bench.
Weinstein was convicted in Los Angeles in 2022 of another rape. His 16-year prison sentence in that case still stands, but his lawyers appealed in June, arguing he did not get a fair trial.
Weinstein has remained in custody in New York’s Rikers Island jail complex, with occasional trips to a hospital for medical treatment, while awaiting the retrial.
The Associated Press does not generally identify people alleging sexual assault unless they consent to be named.
Israeli PM says Trump has invited him to the White House on Feb. 4
- This would make Benjamin Netanyahu the first foreign leader to visit the White House in Trump’s second term
- Meeting would be chance for Netanyahu to remind world of US support, defend Israel’s conduct of Gaza war
WADI GAZA: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that President Donald Trump has invited him to visit the White House on Feb. 4, which would make him the first foreign leader to do so in Trump’s second term.
The announcement came as the United States pressures Israel and Hamas to continue a ceasefire that has paused a devastating 15-month war in Gaza. Talks about the ceasefire’s more difficult second phase, which aims to end the war, are set to begin on Feb. 3.
There was no immediate comment from the White House. Trump teased the upcoming visit in a conversation with reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday, but didn’t provide details. “I’m going to be speaking with Bibi Netanyahu in the not too distant future,” he said.
The meeting would be a chance for Netanyahu, under pressure at home, to remind the world of the support he has received from Trump over the years, and to defend Israel’s conduct of the war. Last year, the two men met face-to-face for the first time in nearly four years at Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago estate.
Israel is the largest recipient of US military aid, and Netanyahu is likely to encourage Trump not to hold up some weapons deliveries the way the Biden administration did, though it continued other deliveries and overall military support.
Even before taking office this month, Trump was sending his special Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to the region to apply pressure along with the Biden administration to get the current Gaza ceasefire achieved.
But Netanyahu has vowed to renew the war if Hamas doesn’t meet his demands in negotiations over the ceasefire’s second phase of the ceasefire, meant to discuss a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a “sustainable calm.”
Under the deal, more than 375,000 Palestinians have crossed into northern Gaza since Israel allowed their return on Monday morning, the United Nations said Tuesday. That represents over a third of the million people who fled in the war’s opening days.
Many of the Palestinians trudging along a seaside road or crossing in vehicles after security inspections were getting their first view of shattered northern Gaza under the fragile ceasefire, now in its second week.
They were determined, if homes were damaged or destroyed, to pitch makeshift shelters or sleep outdoors amid the vast piles of broken concrete or perilously leaning buildings. After months of crowding in squalid tent camps or former schools in Gaza’s south, they would finally be home.
“It’s still better for us to be on our land than to live on a land that’s not yours,” said Fayza Al-Nahal as she prepared to leave the southern city of Khan Younis for the north.
At least two Palestinians set off for the north by sea, crowding into a rowboat with a bicycle and other belongings.
Hani Al-Shanti, displaced from Gaza City, looked forward to feeling at peace in whatever he found, “even if it is a roof and walls without furniture, even if it is without a roof.” One newly returned woman hung laundry in the ruins of her home, its walls blown out.
Under the ceasefire, the next release of hostages held in Gaza, and Palestinian prisoners from Israeli custody, is set to occur on Thursday, followed by another exchange on Saturday.
