NEW YORK, March 13 (Xinhua) -- A U.S. scholar on Sunday pointed out the fundamental challenges lying ahead of the coming face-to-face meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).
"The chances that this opening, as unprecedented as it is, will lead to a final resolution of the North Korean nuclear crisis are slim," Patricia Kim said in a published analysis on Washington Post.
"To lay down its nuclear weapons, Kim must be genuinely convinced that the United States will not harm his regime. This won't be easy, given Washington's track record of taking out dictators, most recently in Iraq and Libya," she said.
The DPRK will also face struggles to prove its trustworthiness, given a track record of violating deal after deal in the past, added Kim, a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank and publisher.
The DPRK is most likely expecting the United States to refrain from imposing additional sanctions or engaging in other punitive measures during negotiations, while Washington's position at the time was that the sanctions were justified, said the scholar.
On Tuesday, when news broke that the DPRK was willing to talk, the U.S. State Department announced new sanctions on the Asian country after formally determining it used chemical weapons last year to assassinate Kim Jong Un's half brother, Kim Jong Nam, she added.
The scholar further noted that talks could go nowhere if Washington and Pyongyang have wildly different end goals for the negotiations, featuring with the gap between the U.S. willingness to sign a peace agreement in exchange for the denuclearization and the DPRK's request for the termination of the U.S. alliance with South Korea and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula.
