Last week, Moon Jae-in’s government made its first formal overture to North Korea, proposing military discussions on ceasing hostile actions and Red Cross talks on resuming reunions of divided families. But the proposals were quickly shot down by the White House, where presidential spokesman Sean Spicer said the atmosphere for such talks was “far away.” The New York Times leapt on the exchange, calling the disagreement the “first visible split” between Moon and the Trump administration.

But it’s not clear how deep this rift really is, or if the press was exaggerating it. After all, during Moon’s summit with Trump last month, the two governments signed a joint communique that strongly endorsed Moon’s desire to resolve North-South conflicts through bilateral dialogue and negotiation. Moon himself has played down any differences with Trump, explaining on July 19th to Korean lawmakers that the initial phase of any talks will focus on humanitarian issues. “Denuclearization talks require the right conditions,” he added, through a spokesman.

Ironically, reports of a US-ROK dispute over North Korea surfaced as the Trump administration itself is talking to Pyongyang. “The Trump administration has been negotiating with the North Koreans – that’s a fact, not a myth,” Leon V. Sigal, a former State Department official, told Newstapa in an interview. Sigal is part of a team of former US officials and experts who meet regularly with North Korean government officials for discussions that are called “Track 2 dialogues.”

The administration’s talks with North Korea came to light in June, shortly before the death of Otto Warmbier, the American college student held by Pyongyang for 17 months. According to a story published on June 18 by the Wall Street Journal, US diplomats have been holding secret talks in Pyongyang and Europe with North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator, Madame Choi Sun Hee, for “more than a year” as part of the “Track 2” process. Then, after President Trump’s inauguration in January, “the official and nonofficial American contacts with the North Koreans started to merge.”

In May, Joseph Yun, the State Department’s special representative for North Korea, met Choi in Oslo at a meeting organized by US participants in the “Track 2” process. Their purpose was to discuss the plight of four Americans in prison in North Korea. But after leaving Norway, Choi, whose title is director-general of the North American affairs bureau of North Korea’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters that her government would be willing to meet US officials for talks on the nuclear issue “if the conditions are set,” the Journal said.

In early June, as part of this process, Yun met in New York with Pyongyang’s ambassador to the UN. It was here that he was informed that Warmbier, who was being considered for release, was in a coma. Yun, on instructions from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, then flew to Pyongyang to bring him back. Since his death a few days later, no new talks have been scheduled as the Trump administration considers its options. “The question is, is this a hiatus or is Trump rethinking the process?” asked Sigal.

Judging by the administration’s latest statements, the road to direct talks is still open. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, for example, has repeatedly said that the United States is not going to war with North Korea, and has instead emphasized negotiations. After Trump’s UN Ambassador Nicki Haley threatened the use of force against North Korea after its July 4 missile test, Mattis called reporters into his Pentagon office and flatly denied that the launch had brought the US and North Korea closer to war.

This does not mean, however, that a consensus has been reached in Washington for negotiations to proceed – far from it. Hawkish elements from both the Democratic and Republican parties continue to call for a harder line against North Korea, and even for regime change. But there are indications that key elements of the national security state are beginning to see that there is no viable option but re-opening direct talks with North Korea over its nuclear and missile ambitions.

Some of the strongest voices for engagement have come from former senior leaders of US intelligence who came of age during the Cold War. One of them is James Clapper, the former US Director of National Intelligence who flew to Pyongyang in 2014 to retrieve a US prisoner. Several times over the last month, he has proposed that the United States and North Korea open “interest sections” in each other’s capitals. This is similar to the US arrangement with Cuba before President Obama normalized relations in 2015.

Clapper, who was a military intelligence officer in Korea during the 1980s, has also proposed that North Korea “cap” its missile tests “in return for dialogue and a peace treaty.” In a recent interview on CNN, he said, “The only option is diplomacy. The best hope is to engage with them.” In his recent speech in Seoul about his 2014 visit to Pyongyang, he spoke almost wistfully about learning about the pain of national division from the senior North Korean intelligence officer who rode with him in his car.

He even wanted to talk about the tragedy that occurred when the peninsular was being split through these many years. In fact, he mentioned, I thought it was interesting, how the two languages have separated. The North Korean version of Korean was very different than the South Korean version. In many ways I thought that was a very telling comment.

Another advocate for a negotiated peace is Robert Gates, the former Secretary for Defense who spent nearly 27 years at the CIA, where he was the director from 1991 to 1993. He recently unveiled a sweeping proposal that would allow North Korea to keep some of its nuclear weapons while agreeing to hard limits on his arsenal of missiles. Under his plan, which he outlined in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on July 10, the US would “forswear a policy of regime change” as it did with Castro after the 1962 missile crisis, sign a peace treaty with Kim Jong Un and consider “some changes” in the structure of US military forces in South Korea.

But Gates’ plan has a fatal flaw: it would be brokered entirely through China. Under Gates’ proposal, Beijing would be required to bring North Korea to the talks and convince its government to accept invasive inspections of its weapons facilities to ensure compliance with the agreement. The US would tell China, “If that is not an outcome you can accept, we are going to take steps you hate,” Gates told the Journal.

This “let China do it” mentality is very strong in Washington at the moment. Its most prominent proponent is Victor Cha, the director of Korea programs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who was the deputy head of the US delegation to the six-party talks with North Korea in the Bush administration.

“It’s not enough to ask China to pressure Pyongyang to set up a U.S.-North Korea negotiation,” Cha wrote recently in the Washington Post with Jake Sullivan, the former director of policy planning for the Obama administration. “China has to be a central part of the negotiation, too.” They argued that “China, rather than the United States, should be paying for North Korea to halt and roll back its nuclear and missile programs.”

While this view is heartily endorsed in the media, many Korea specialists scoff at the idea that North Korea would let China push it around like that.

“Pyongyang will perceive any effort to get them to denuclearize as another overly intrusive move and lacking respect for North Korean sovereignty,” said James F. Person, a historian who has specialized in North Korea’s diplomacy with China and the former Soviet Union. “We can’t afford to outsource our policy to China because that’s asking North Korea to do what they most resent,” he said. “Ultimately, we will have to talk to the North.” Person spoke at a July 10 press briefing organized by the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a US government think tank in Washington.

This pragmatic view has emerged in recent months among former high-ranking officials, such as William Perry, who negotiated with North Korea on its missile program as Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration. On the eve of President Moon’s visit to Washington in June, Perry was one of several retired senior officials who signed a letter to Trump urging him to begin negotiations without any preconditions with the North. This week, in an interview with Senator Bernie Sanders, Perry explained his position.

“North Korea is not a crazy nation,” he told Sanders. “They are reckless, ruthless, but they are not crazy. They are open to logic and reason. Their main objective is to sustain their regime. If we can find a way of dealing with them that they can see gives them an opportunity to stay in the regime, we can get results.”

That was the primary message at the Wilson Center briefing, which was led by former California congresswoman Jane Harman. Last fall, she and Person floated a proposal for direct talks with North Korea in the Washington Post. “Only the United States – the supposed existential threat that justifies [North Korea’s] nuclear and ballistic missile programs – can fully address Pyongyang’s security concerns,” they wrote. At the Wilson briefing, Person elaborated on their proposal.

He argued that the latest North Korean missile test was not a “game changer,” as many analysts have suggested, but is instead part of a “credible defensive rationale that goes back a very long time.” But now that they have the capability to launch ICBMs that can travel great distances, he said, North Korea will continue to test to give it the best possible leverage when the door opens for talks with Washington. “They want to make sure when they get to the negotiating table that they’ve pushed their program as far as they can,” he said.

So what would a direct US-North Korean negotiation look like? Most analysts believe it would have to begin with the North offering to freeze its nuclear and missile programs in exchange for the US and South Korea scaling down their annual military exercises. At the Wilson briefing, New York Times reporter David Sanger suggested that the US has a “window of opportunity” to offer such a deal soon because the main US-ROK exercises take place in the spring. “Between now and next spring, we wouldn’t lose much” if the US temporarily halted the exercises, he said.

Sigal, who has been talking to the North for over 20 years, cautioned that, for any deal to be accepted in Washington, a North Korean moratorium would have to go beyond the freeze of current programs as suggested by China and Russia. He said that would involve North Korea stopping its uranium enrichment and plutonium production as well as its nuclear and missile testing. That, in turn, would require the United States to pledge to end its “hostile policy,” as demanded for decades by North Korea.

“You’ve got to suspend the production of fissionable material too,” he told Newstapa. He said the US would “have to pay for that, not in money terms but in terms of moving away from the hostile policy. Some of that’s going to involve military exercises, some of that’s going to involve [lifting] sanctions, some of that’s going to involve starting the peace process. But that’s what’s got to be worked. That’s the first stage agreement that may be possible.”

There was a moment on the opening day of President Moon Jae-in’s summit meeting at the White House last week that crystallized the differences between South Korea and the United States in the era of Donald Trump. It came on Friday, after Trump and Moon had made their formal remarks about North Korea and the importance of the US-South Korean military alliance.

Suddenly, Trump cut loose with a critique of South Korea’s economic ties with the United States. “We are renegotiating a trade deal right now as we speak,” he declared to the surprise of many onlookers. He described the Korea-US Trade Agreement (KORUS), signed by the Obama administration and a favorite target of his during his campaign, as a “rough deal for the United States.” “We want something that’s going to be good for the American worker,” he informed Moon.

But the real shocker came inside the White House cabinet room, where Moon and his foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, had been invited to meet the rest of Trump’s team. After making a few welcoming comments, Trump asked Wilbur Ross, his Secretary of Commerce, to speak about trade. With cameras rolling (at Trump’s insistence), Ross lit into Moon and Kang about South Korea’s restrictions on US auto and steel exports.

Ross, who had alienated the German government with a similar lecture a few days before, insisted that Seoul’s administrative “rulemaking” on foreign products affects the “access US companies have to the Korean market,” particularly in manufacturing. There was no mention whatsoever of North Korea or Moon’s desire to resolve the tense situation with his neighbor. But as Moon began to offer his response, CNN quickly cut away, leaving the last word to Trump’s 80 year-old cabinet secretary.

“It all amounted to an unusual display of one-upmanship in a meeting between close allies,” the Associated Press concluded. It was also a stunning violation of protocol: in any other administration, the lead spokesman on foreign policy would be the Secretary of State, a position now held by former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson. He, however, has been effectively sidelined, and media stories last week said he was deeply angry over his treatment by the White House.

Yet, as with most confrontations between Americans and South Koreans, there was a hidden undercurrent to the story that was missed by the US and Korean media.

Ross, as Moon must know from his experience as a labor lawyer in Busan, is the same New York capitalist who led the wave of vulture investors who descended on South Korea during the IMF crisis of the 1990s. During that time, foreign companies and private equity funds made small fortunes buying and selling bankrupt Korean companies – including, in Ross’ case, steel manufacturers – while thousands of Korean workers lost their jobs.

In one incident I reported on in 1999, Ross himself helped break a strike at the bankrupt Halla Group. Even though Ross was rewarded by Kim Dae Jung’s Blue House for his efforts during the crisis, many of his victims were left with nothing. Ross left Korea “with a reputation as a swindler who made exorbitant profits out of vulnerable companies,” a Korean economist told The New York Times in 2006. South Korea, of course, has come roaring back since then, and is now the 12th largest economy in the world.

But there was a lesson in Ross’s rant. By pushing his decades-old agenda of forcing changes in the Korean economy, Ross was acting, like Trump and his family often do, on his own parochial concerns and personal financial interests. For a moment, US foreign policy was totally focused on the interests of one rich man. It was a reminder that, despite all the rhetoric about the alliance and their shared interests, South Korea and the United States, and their respective, presidents, are on sharply divergent paths in 2017.

For Moon, the purpose of his visit was to firm up the US-South Korean military alliance and seek common purpose with Trump on North Korea. During the first two days of his trip, he paid emotional visits to the Korean War Memorial and with US Marines who had helped his parents escape from North Korea in 1950. In a major concession on North Korea before the summit, Kang had signalled that the contentious deployment of THAAD – currently delayed by an environmental review – would be eventually approved by Seoul. Moon reaffirmed this policy when he met with US lawmakers and Republican leaders on Thursday.

As a result of his actions, Moon got much of what he wanted. In his meetings with Trump, they agreed to leave the door open to dialogue with North Korea “under the right circumstances,” according to their joint statement. Trump, meanwhile, “supported President Moon’s aspirations to restart inter-Korean dialogue on issues including humanitarian affairs.” He also confirmed South Korea’s “leading role” in creating conditions for peaceful reunification.

Still, Trump made it clear from the start that his unilateral approach was still in play, particularly towards China. One day before Moon arrived in Washington, Trump’s Treasury Department announced new sanctions against China as a way to pressure North Korea, charging four Chinese banks and individuals with laundering money for Pyongyang. But his directive, which was accompanied by a major US arms sale to Taiwan, was widely interpreted “as a shot across the bow not only to Beijing, but also to Mr. Moon, since it emphasizes pressure over diplomacy,” The New York Times commented.

In another sign of bilateral dischord that same day, Trump’s national security adviser, former Army general H.R. McMaster, declared that Trump was preparing a list of military options against North Korea. “There’s recognition that there has to be more pressure on the regime,” he told the Center for a New American Security, a Democratic-aligned think tank heavily funded by military contractors.

Meanwhile, at the White House, Trump emphasized how the deepening military relationship with South Korea was good for business. He noted that South Korea is “giving very big orders to the United States for military. They’re buying F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed and buying other military equipment at a level that they’ve never done before, so that’s good.” (he didn’t mention that Lockheed also makes the THAAD system.)

How Moon responded to Ross’s lecture on Korean trade practices has yet to be reported. But it was obvious that Trump’s economic offensive did not go over well with him and his delegation. On Saturday, just before he left for Seoul, Moon told Korean reporters that any talk of renegotiating KORUS was “outside of the agreement” he reached with the White House.

Despite the friction, however, Moon appeared immensely satisfied with his meetings, particularly Trump’s agreement with his dual approach to North Korea and their emphasis on sanctions and dialogue. “Securing President Trump’s support for South Korea’s leading role in fostering a favorable condition for a peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula and resumption of inter-Korean dialogue was a very important achievement,” he told a gathering of overseas Koreans just before he left on Saturday.

US officials and observers were also pleased. “Everyone was expecting a train wreck,” Victor Cha, the top Korea specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told Newstapa after Moon’s Friday night speech at the think tank. “But on the contrary, everything went very well.”

Asked if the Korean government’s environmental review of THAAD might present a future problem for the alliance, Cha said the United States was assured by Foreign Minister Kang’s “unequivocal” remarks to CSIS last Monday that Seoul “has no intention to basically reverse” its commitment to THAAD. “That was very important, and cleared the air,” said Cha (he would not confirm or deny rumors that he may be the next US ambassador to Seoul).

In any case, the CSIS speech served as a kind of stamp of approval of Moon by Washington’s foreign policy establishment. There, sitting in the front row, were many of the country’s best known diplomats and national security officials. They included two former Secretaries of State, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright; Richard Armitage, Powell’s former deputy at State and a former Pentagon official; former Secretary of Defense William Cohen; and Richard Lugar, the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime player in US-Korea relations. Afterwards, President Moon spent nearly two hours meeting with the CSIS board of directors in a “wide-ranging” discussion, according to Cha.

“This was the same crowd that turned out to see Park Guen-hye last year,” noted Sang Joo Kim, the executive vice president of the Institute for Corean-American Studies, a local organization of Korea experts. “But times have changed.”

Moon’s first public appearance at the US Chamber of Commerce provided a dramatic display of the corporate interests driving American policy. Several hundred business people were in attendance, as well as dozens of officials from the Departments of Treasury, State and Commerce as well as the Office of the US Trade Representative.

Many attendees were from the defense industry, including United Technologies, the owner of jet engine maker Pratt & Whitney. Mark Lippert, the former US ambassador who recently joined Boeing Corporation as vice president for international business, was virtually mobbed by admirers of his recent tenure in Seoul. Others wore badges from PhRMA, the huge pharmaceutical industry lobby; AirBNB, the global rental company; and corporate giants CIGNA, Honeywell and Qualcomm. Korean companies Doosan, LG and Samsung were also in attendance.

One of the largest US contingents came from the LNG industry in Texas and the US Gulf Coast. At one table, I met Kathleen Eisbrenner, the founder and CEO of a Texas company called NextDecade, which is building a massive gas liquification plant in Brownsville, TX, with the goal of exporting LNG to South Korea and other Asian markets. Jee Yoon, NextDecades’ business development manager, proudly pointed to the executives at his table from GE, one of the nation’s largest corporations, which has invested in the company.

Two days later, at the White House, Trump announced that Cheniere Energy of Louisiana was “sending its first shipment of American liquefied natural gas to South Korea in a deal worth more than $25 billion.” With Korea Gas in the market for more LNG, the other companies will be cutting similar deals soon. To get there, however, US executives at the meeting said they needed Moon and Trump to take a united stand on North Korea. “The two of them should stand together and say we’re lined up when it comes to North Korea,” Jeff Jones, the director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea, was overheard saying. “That will send a strong message.”

But President Moon was looking beyond the confrontation with the North. In his conciliatory speech to the Chamber, he made a strong case for his peace initiatives, arguing that negotiations towards resolving the North Korean nuclear issue would benefit the United States by creating new business opportunities for American corporations.

As the peace process unfolds, Moon promised the Chamber, “you will be able to invest in South Korea with no concerns” and therefore “gain an interest in future investments in North Korea.” It was an appeal to the best of American sensibilities, but it’s difficult to know if anyone listened.

One of the most dramatic contrasts between Moon and Trump was their personal styles of dealing with the press and the public. Throughout the summit, US news coverage was dominated by Trump’s bizarre tweets attacking Mika Brzezinski, a well-known media figure. “Mr. President, do you regret any of your tweets?” one reporter could be heard shouting at Trump as Moon made his first entrance to the White House. The controversy worsened over the weekend, when Trump tweeted a video of himself wrestling with a figure from CNN, the network he disdains and calls “fake news.”

Moon, however, seemed to take delight in his encounters with both the public and the press. During his speech at the Chamber, a crowd of Koreans gathered in front of the ornate building near the White House to welcome him. Some had just come from a separate demonstration at the White House protesting THAAD. Suddenly, President Moon appeared in their midst, shaking hands and greeting his fellow Koreans. One of them was Hana Yang, a former resident of Seoul who had voted for Moon in the last election. “This is an unforgettable memory,” she told me. “We believe he will make our country much better.”

On Saturday, in Moon’s last event in Washington, over 500 overseas Koreans showed up at the Capitol Hilton to hear him speak about his visit. One of them was Haeran Ku, an interior designer from New York. She explained that her father, Ku Ik Kyun, had been an independence fighter and under Park Chung Hee, he was later jailed. When he died at the age of 106, Park would not allow him to be buried in a national cemetery. “So imagine how happy I am that Moon Jae-in is president now,” she told me. “He’s taking all the right steps.”

H.K. Suh, the vice president of the National Association of Korean Americans and a longtime activist from the DC area, said the crowd at the speech was very diverse in comparison to previous visits by Park Guen-hye and other former presidents. “Those supporting the candlelight vigils and the victims of the Sewol were all represented,” he said. “The people were very enthused and energized.” Moon’s primary message, Suh added, is that while the alliance is strong and important, “it’s time now for South Korea to get in the driver’s seat.” As a result, “back home there’s going to be more room for intra-Korea dialogue, with will lead to a reduction of tensions.”

WHAT JUST HAPPENED WITH NORTH KOREA?

Over the past two weeks, America and the world experienced another serious crisis in Korea that frightened many people into believing that a nuclear war was about to break out any moment.

The tension dissipated with last Monday’s declaration from Kim Jong Un that he would “watch a little more” the “conduct of the Yankees” before considering plans to test-fire three missiles towards Guam. His announcement was followed by a tweet from President Trump praising Kim for his “very wise and well reasoned decision” and saying that the “alternative would have been both catastrophic and unacceptable!”

But the big questions about the war scare were: How did it begin? Why did it end? And what comes next?

The latest standoff was sparked by the same combination of forces that led the United States into invading Iraq in 2003: leaked reports from US intelligence, a media willing to believe almost anything about “the enemy,” in this case North Korea; and an arrogant and power-mad president, Donald Trump, who is in deep trouble at home for his aggressive behavior towards critics and appalling statements on race and immigration.

On August 8, someone in US intelligence leaked a Defense Intelligence Agency report to the Washington Post saying that Kim Jong Un could have a nuclear-tipped ICBM capable of hitting the United States by 2018, “crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power.” The leak immediately became the story of the day, sparking CNN and other cable networks to jump into action with alarming tales suggesting that Kim now had the capability to nuke any city in the United States.

As one US journalist wrote in the leftist publication Counterpunch, “fourteen years after the disaster in Iraq was sold to Americans on the pretense of WMDs, which never existed, the mainstream media continue to push war hungry narratives.”

The DIA claim may have been a huge exaggeration. After analyzing North Korean data, several analysts pointed out in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that the Hwasong-14 missile fired in recent tests “is a sub-level ICBM that will not be able to deliver nuclear warheads to the continental United States.”  But those doubts, which were almost certainly included in US intelligence reports provided to Trump, didn’t stop the president.

Hours after the Post story came out, he issued his apocalyptic warning that North Korea would face “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if it continued to threaten the United States. He ended the week by saying that US forces in Asia were “locked and loaded” and ready for battle.

Those threats became more real on August 11, when NBC News broadcast a detailed report that the Pentagon has plans to strike “approximately two dozen North Korean missile-launch sites, testing grounds and support facilities” using B-1B heavy bombers stationed at Anderson Air Force Base in Guam. “Pairs of B-1Bs have conducted 11 practice runs of a similar mission since the end of May, the last taking place on Monday,” NBC said. Reporter Cynthia McFadden added that the B-1Bs could fire their missiles from outside of Korean airspace, thus making it possible to launch unilateral strikes.

What happened next was hardly surprising. North Korea’s KCNA declared that the North’s “Strategic Force” was “carefully examining” plans for making “an enveloping fire” at areas near Guam with medium and long range missiles, and were only awaiting the command from Kim Jong Un. Because of the long history of B1 flights to Korea from Guam, the historian Bruce Cumings wrote in the Guardian, North Korea’s statement had “a concrete, predictable nature.”

To the US media, however, it was seen as a declaration of war. Every network sent correspondents scurrying to Guam, where they interviewed local residents and government officials about the fears about a potential attack. Many of these reports, such as this broadcast on CBS News, turned into sheer war propaganda for the Pentagon and its fleet of bombers (“backed up by plenty of firepower,” they “regularly fly over the Korean peninsula and would be used in a potential conflict.”)

Then, over the weekend, US officials downplayed the threat while warning that an attack on Guam would be met with force. “If they fire at the United States, it could escalate into war very quickly,” Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis declared. On Monday, came Kim Jong Un’s declaration about the need to “defuse the tensions” around Guam following his visit to the Korean People’s Army Strategic Force Command.

Although Yonhap and other Korean media ran Kim’s statement, it wasn’t described as a breakthrough until the Wall Street Journal filed a story late that night that the North “had pulled back its threat to attack a U.S. territory.” After this, it still took several days for the US cable networks to admit that the situation had changed. This was particularly true of CNN, which had feverishly reported every new development in the standoff. It didn’t report Kim’s shift until Trump tweeted about it on Wednesday, 36 hours after the story first broke.

Fox News and other conservative media, of course, said Kim’s about-face was due entirely to Trump’s tough statements and threats. In fact, those statements were seen by some of Trump’s advisers as ill-advised and dangerous, which is why they spent the weekend after his “locked and loaded” comments trying to defuse the crisis. One of the strongest signals came from CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who has been surprisingly candid about North Korea’s justifications for building a new arsenal.

Last Sunday, he took to Fox News to offer assurances that “nothing imminent” was about to happen with North Korea. He added: “What I’m talking about is, I’ve heard folks talking about that we have been on the cusp of a nuclear war. No intelligence that would indicate we are in that place today.” The same day, H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, told NBC that Trump is determined to “resolve the crisis short of a military conflict.”

Still, it was clear from statements from the administration that the shifts in both Washington and Pyongyang came after intensive discussions with China as well as possible back-channel communications with Pyongyang. Kim Jong Un’s desire to defuse tensions, for example, was published hours after China told the United States that it would immediately impose a ban on imports of North Korean coal, iron and seafood as part of its enforcement of the recent sanctions passed by the U.N. Security Council.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, “the timing of the announcement was a response to Mr. Trump’s plans to kick off a probe into China’s alleged theft of US intellectual property.” The New York Times added later that the White House had held off from announcing the probe “to secure China’s support” for the UN sanctions on North Korea. Later in the week, Steve Bannon, Trump’s controversial political adviser, admitted that Trump’s focus on China and its trade deficit with Beijing was the driving factor in his North Korea policies.

“To me, the economic war with China is everything,” he told The American Prospect, a liberal magazine that has been critical of China’s trade policies. He also added some thoughts on Korea. “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it,” he said. “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.” Bannon was fired 24 hours later after his comment.

Another factor in the rapid end to the tensions may have been President Moon Jae-in’s response to reports about the possibility of a unilateral US strike on North Korea. It hardly seems like a coincidence that, hours after NBC reported on the Pentagon’s plans to hit North Korean missile sites, Chung Eui-yong, Moon’s national security adviser, spoke to McMaster and agreed to “discuss in advance” any military steps they could take to contain North Korea.

Then on August 15 came Moon’s extraordinary speech insisting that “only the Republic of Korea can make the decision for military action on the Korean Peninsula.” This was widely seen in the US as a direct warning to Trump about taking unilateral action, and was displayed as a front-page story in the New York Times. Moon was also responding to critics from the opposition parties that he has appeared weak and ineffectual as Trump’s threats dominated the news over the past several weeks.

With the immediate crisis over, attention began to focus on the possibility of negotiations and how they might begin.

Mattis and Secretary of State Tillerson explained the Trump administration’s position in an unusual joint op-ed written for the Wall Street Journal. After explaining that the US had no interest in regime change in Pyongyang, they laid down their conditions for talks. “Given the long record of North Korea’s dishonesty in negotiations and repeated violations of international agreements, it is incumbent upon the [Kim] regime to signal its desire to negotiate in good faith” by ceasing its nuclear tests and missile launches, they wrote.

North Korea has already put a hold on its nuclear tests; many observers here note that its last underground explosion was in September 2016, three months before the US presidential election and eight months before South Korea’s. Now, the question is, what would Kim Jong Un get in return for stopping his missile tests?

One idea, which has the support of several former high-ranking US officials, is for the US and South Korea to either suspend or drastically scale down their war games that have been criticized by North Korea and China as a barrier to peace in the region. The idea was given added impetus last week by the New York Times, which reported that a “permutation” of a two-sided freeze “may be the best way to defuse the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.” The next exercises, Ulchi-Freedom Guardian, began on Monday.

So far, the freeze idea is a non-starter for the Pentagon. After meeting with President Moon in Seoul last week, Gen. Dunford told reporters traveling with him that the exercises were “not currently on the table as part of the negotiation at any level.” He added: “as long as the threat in North Korea exists, we need to maintain a high state of readiness to respond to that threat.”

But Bannon, in his interview, threw out an idea that’s also flatly opposed by Dunford but shows how Trump might deal with North Korea in future negotiations. Trump, he said, “might consider a deal in which China got North Korea to freeze its nuclear buildup with verifiable inspections and the United States removed its troops from the peninsula.” That echoes one of the president’s theme from the 2016 campaign, when he criticized South Korea and Japan for not paying enough for the US troops on their soil.

Meanwhile, US critics of Trump’s policies are looking back to the Bill Clinton administration and how it handled the 1994 crisis with North Korea over its decision to abandon the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty. Last week, 64 Democratic lawmakers released a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson expressing “profound concern” about Trump’s threatening comments and supporting Tillerson’s proposals for direct talks with Pyongyang.

In a significant passage, they urged him to “make a good faith effort to replicate” the success of the 1994 Agreed Framework in which North Korea froze its nuclear program for over 10 years. The current situation, of course, is very different: in 1994, North Korea had yet to explode a nuclear bomb, and had only tested a few missiles. Still, the conflict over NPT almost led Clinton to launch a pre-emptive strike on North Korea’s nuclear facility, an action that was called off after Jimmy Carter flew to Pyongyang and negotiated a preliminary settlement with North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

It’s important to remember, former US diplomats say, that Pyongyang traded its nuclear program in return for an end to enmity – the same demand they are making today. “What people don’t know is that North Korea made no fissile material whatsoever from 1991 to 2003,” Leon V. Sigal, a former State Department official who directs a Northeast Asia security project at the Social Science Research Council in New York, told Newstapa. “That’s a pretty good deal.” The framework collapsed in 2003 amidst accusations from the Bush administration that the North had started a secret uranium program, which Pyongyang denied.

Despite the propaganda onslaught of the last two weeks, most Americans support a negotiated solution to the tensions with North Korea. According to a Quinnipiac University national poll released on August 16th, 86 percent of US voters support the U.S. and its allies “negotiating a deal with North Korea to prevent them from using nuclear weapons,” with 60 percent saying that they expect the issue to be resolved diplomatically.

Now, they say, it’s up to the Trump administration to make the peace.

On Tuesday, Tillerson seemed to shift towards dialogue when he noted that Pyongyang has gone for two weeks without a missile test. “We hope that this is the beginning of the signal we’ve been looking for,” he said, according to the New York Times. “Perhaps we’re seeing our pathway to sometime in the near future of having some dialogue.”