US President Joe Biden on Friday pleaded for a “pragmatic” approach to North Korea, while acknowledging that negotiations on the denuclearization of the reclusive regime would be extremely delicate.
“We have no illusions about the difficulty of the task, absolutely none. The last four administrations have not reached the target. It is an incredibly difficult target,” he said at a conference. joint press release with his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in.
Announcing that he had appointed seasoned diplomat Sung Kim as special envoy, the Democratic president did not rule out meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un one day but stressed that he would not do so without clear commitments from the latter.
He took the opportunity to criticize the approach of his predecessor Donald Trump who had met “Chairman Kim” twice (in Singapore and then in Hanoi) without achieving tangible results.
“I will not offer him international recognition (without compensation),” he insisted.
Neither obsession with the “big deal”, nor “strategic patience”: Joe Biden had already rejected the approaches of his two direct predecessors, Donald Trump and Barack Obama. But he did not reveal his game on Friday and confined himself to very general formulas, pleading for “pragmatic” advances to reduce tensions and move closer to the “ultimate goal”: “the denuclearization of North Korea” .
The South Korean president, who had been the architect of the mediation between Pyongyang and Washington under the Trump presidency, hopes to use the last year of his mandate to finally arrive at an “irreversible peace” on the peninsula.
On Friday, he praised Washington’s “will for dialogue”. But how do you get Pyongyang back to the negotiating table? The reclusive regime has already denounced the “hostile” and “spurious” diplomacy of the new administration.
– Singapore Declaration –
Despite being hit by multiple international sanctions, Pyongyang has rapidly developed its military capabilities in recent years under the leadership of Kim Jong Un, carrying out several nuclear tests and successfully testing ballistic missiles.
The White House assures that it wants to rely, among other things, on the joint declaration of the Singapore summit in 2018.
The brief document referred to the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula”, but this vague formulation had given rise to very different interpretations on the part of the two sides.
Proof of the region’s importance to Washington, Moon Jae-in is only the second leader to be received in person at the White House after Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.
But on China, Washington’s number one strategic adversary, he has remained more cautious than the Japanese leader in the united front that Washington is calling for against Beijing.
In their joint statement, Biden and Suga openly referred to growing tensions over Taiwan, which denounces increasingly hostile actions on the part of Beijing.
Even measured in a measured way, it was the first time that a Japanese leader had signed a joint declaration with a US president on Taiwan since the two allies recognized Beijing instead of Taipei in the 1970s.
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