<\/p>\n
As the Trump administration inches toward a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on his country\u2019s nuclear weapons program, Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner has the ear of the president, detailing what he believes the administration\u2019s priorities should be in upcoming discussions.<\/p>\n
Gardner said in a recent interview that he\u2019s told President Donald Trump he should have one goal in a meeting with the North Korean leader.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has to be denuclearization \u2013 there is no other goal or purpose of this meeting,\u201d Gardner, the chairman of the subcommittee on East Asia Policy, said in his Senate office last week. \u201cIf we have any inkling that denuclearization is off the table or is being diluted, then the president shouldn\u2019t even have the meeting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gardner also said he\u2019s laid out for Trump and then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo that he sees a successful summit as the attainment of concrete steps toward denuclearization.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a step toward inspections, it\u2019s steps toward a signed agreement on something like this,\u201d Gardner said. \u201cBut the key is this: (The steps) have to be concrete and verifiable, and we don\u2019t give up the farm, so to speak, before we know what they\u2019ve done.\u201d<\/p>\n
North Korea recently indicated a willingness to denuclearize, a claim met with deep skepticism by lawmakers and experts that have heard similar rhetoric from North Korean leadership for years.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of us that have worked North Korea are pretty skeptical that North Korea is going to do this time what they promised to do eight previous times in eight previous agreements,\u201d said Bruce Klingner, former CIA deputy division chief for Korea, and current Northeast Asia research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.<\/p>\n
This gesture from North Korea is the first diplomatic outreach under Kim Jong Un\u2019s reign as leader of North Korea, a sign the sanctions are taking a toll. But Klingner, who spent 20 years working for American intelligence agencies, said the Kim family has relied on a two-play playbook of provocation and charm offensives throughout their regime. But since Kim Jong Un took over after the death of his father, he has relied on provocation and largely avoids charm offensives.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis could be different,\u201d Klingner said. \u201cOr we could be just getting back on the horse again \u2013 the one that\u2019s bucked us eight times.\u201d<\/p>\n
The difference this time is a shift in U.S. policy toward a \u201cmaximum pressure campaign,\u201d which Gardner has called for since the later years of the Obama administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur entire plan of maximum pressure was structured to cut North Korea off economically and diplomatically from the world,\u201d Gardner said. \u201cAnd to put so much pressure on them that they would have to come to the table.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Gardner maintains strict criteria for both the circumstances under which the summit occurs and what a successful summit looks like, he remains acutely wary of the North Korean intentions and that the country\u2019s dictator could be attempting to garner international support for sanction relief.<\/p>\n
\u201c(We\u2019ve) got to continue maximum pressure,\u201d Gardner said. \u201cNorth Korea\u2019s already said this in 1994, they\u2019ve said it in 2005. You know the saying, \u2018fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.\u2019 We\u2019re not going to go down this road.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kim Jong Un is reverting to the charm offensives of his family\u2019s history at a time when North Korea is strangled by the toughest sanctions yet and continuous military threats from the Trump administration. The leading impetus, Klingner said, is not clear.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can say it\u2019s because of the threats of war,\u201d Klingner said. \u201cYou can say it\u2019s because the sanctions (are) finally taking effect, or you can argue nothing\u2019s really different and this is the path we\u2019ve been down many times before.\u201d<\/p>\n
Klingner said the U.S. ramped up economic pressures on North Korea over the last two years. Gardner authored mandatory sanctions imposed in 2016, which now require the executive branch to sanction any entity or person that does business with North Korea and bumped North Korea up to the fourth-most sanctioned country by the United States.<\/p>\n
Gardner has said the only acceptable outcome is three-fold: complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.<\/p>\n
That seemed an ambitious goal until a few weeks ago when North Korea signaled it would be willing to denuclearize.<\/p>\n
Gardner expressed doubts about North Korean sincerity, saying he had \u201csignificant questions that they will\u201d denuclearize. He reiterated those concerns in a statement just hours before Kim Jong Un crossed the Demilitarized Zone into South Korea for a summit between Korean leaders.<\/p>\n
Gardner\u2019s statement took a different tone.<\/p>\n
\u201cKim Jong Un has repeatedly made bellicose statements, and the North Korean regime has a pattern of broken promises,\u201d he said. \u201cWe cannot take anything Kim Jong Un says at face value, and instead should have a policy of verifying before we trust.\u201d<\/p>\n
Andrew Eversden is an intern for The Journal at American University in Washington, D.C.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Un may be on charm offensive, he warns<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":99992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[4336,24],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-99991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-international-relations","tag-u-s-sen-cory-gardner"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99991"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=99991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}