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.”

A week of confusion in Washington

By Tim Shorrock

On Monday morning, as military tensions between North Korea and the United States appeared to reach a breaking point, Pyongyang’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho went before television cameras in front of his hotel in New York City.

Incensed that President Trump had followed last week’s bombastic speech to the UN by tweeting that North Korean leaders “may not be around much longer,” Ri told reporters that Trump had “declared war” on his country. If a state of war existed, he added, North Korea reserved the right to “make countermeasures, including the right to shoot down United States strategic bombers even when they are not inside the airspace border of our country.”

That, of course, was a reference to the Pentagon’s September 23 flight of US B1-B bombers off North Korea’s east coast, and sparked another round of US media speculation about Kim Jong Un’s military intentions and capabilities. Coming after Ri’s declaration that North Korea was considering testing a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean, they appeared to escalate tensions even more and worried long-time observers of North Korea.

“That’s not the Ri Yong-Ho I know, and I negotiated with him for years,” Joseph DeTrani, a former CIA proliferation expert who met with Ri many times as special envoy to the Six Party Talks during the Bush administration, told Newstapa. Negotiations, not military conflict, “are the only way to resolve” this crisis, he said.

But DeTrani recalled, with some anger, several incidents in the past when the North had taken military action, including its shootdown in 1969 of a US EC-121 reconnaissance plane that killed 31 Americans on board (according to newly released US documents, that incident almost led President Richard Nixon to retaliate with nuclear weapons – but in the end, he did nothing).

DeTrani, who visited Pyongyang several times on behalf of the Obama administration, was one of about 150 people gathered at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an influential military think tank, to hear an address by South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha. In her speech, Kang agreed with US officials who believe that North Korea’s nuclear program has reached, in her words, “a tipping point.”

“Pyongyang seems fast approaching its stated goal of having nuclear-tipped ICBMs capable of targeting the continental U.S.,” she said. As President Moon Jae-in warned CSIS during his visit to Washington in June, she reiterated that “there cannot be another war on the Korean Peninsula” and pledged to take “public diplomacy and outreach” to “a whole new level.” Kang’s appearance seemed to solidify CSIS’s role as an unofficial liaison between Washington and Seoul. That relationship could become official when Victor Cha, CSIS’s Korea Chair, is named US ambassador to South Korea, as expected.

But given the policy differences between Moon and Trump and the constant disagreements within the US administration itself about how to deal with North Korea, it’s easy to see why Ri and the North Korean leadership might be confused about America’s intentions.

Their confusion was apparent on Tuesday, when the Washington Post reported from Switzerland that senior North Korean officials “have been quietly trying to arrange talks with Republican-linked analysts in Washington, in an apparent attempt to make sense of President Trump and his confusing messages to Kim Jong Un’s regime.” As one of those Republicans told the Post, “their number-one concern is Trump. They can’t figure him out.”

Among the Americans contacted were Bruce Klinger, a former CIA analyst who runs North Korea programs for the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and Douglas Paal, who once worked as an Asian analyst for the Reagan and Bush administrations. Paal chaired a meeting last week at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where two Japanese experts warned that the Abe government must be included in any US negotiations with North Korea (I covered it for Newstapa). Neither Klinger or Paal accepted Pyongyang’s invitation, according to the Post.

At another CSIS seminar on Tuesday, Sue Mi Terry, a former senior Korea analyst for the CIA who was the Korea Director for President Bush’s National Security Council, said she met with North Korean official in Sweden this past summer. While they said de-nuclearization was “off the table,” Terry said, the officials “were willing to meet to discuss a peace treaty.” But that idea has been rejected by the US government, largely because it’s seen as a strategy to “get the US to pull out troops” from South Korea, she said. But she was critical of Trump’s tweets about North Korea and his rhetoric at the UN, which she called “counterproductive.”

At the CSIS forum where Kang spoke, there was more talk of Trump’s UN speech. “It’s very important to lower the temperature,” said Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State who in 2000 became the highest-level US official to ever visit Pyongyang. She took issue with US officials and pundits who claim that the Clinton administration’s 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea was a failure. Under that agreement, North Korea “made no new fissile material, no ICBMs and no missiles,” she said. During her talks with former leader Kim Jong Il, she added, Kim said “we could keep US forces in South Korea.”

Trump’s rhetoric has also raised concerns for US public. On Monday, CBS News published a new poll showing that 53 percent of Americans were concerned that Trump might act too quickly “and start an unneeded war in Korea.” According to CBS, “a majority disapprove of President Trump’s handling of the [North Korea] situation, and more voice concern that the U.S. would go to war too quickly than too slowly.”

A week of confusion in Washington

By Tim Shorrock

On Monday morning, as military tensions between North Korea and the United States appeared to reach a breaking point, Pyongyang’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho went before television cameras in front of his hotel in New York City.

Incensed that President Trump had followed last week’s bombastic speech to the UN by tweeting that North Korean leaders “may not be around much longer,” Ri told reporters that Trump had “declared war” on his country. If a state of war existed, he added, North Korea reserved the right to “make countermeasures, including the right to shoot down United States strategic bombers even when they are not inside the airspace border of our country.”

That, of course, was a reference to the Pentagon’s September 23 flight of US B1-B bombers off North Korea’s east coast, and sparked another round of US media speculation about Kim Jong Un’s military intentions and capabilities. Coming after Ri’s declaration that North Korea was considering testing a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean, they appeared to escalate tensions even more and worried long-time observers of North Korea.

“That’s not the Ri Yong-Ho I know, and I negotiated with him for years,” Joseph DeTrani, a former CIA proliferation expert who met with Ri many times as special envoy to the Six Party Talks during the Bush administration, told Newstapa. Negotiations, not military conflict, “are the only way to resolve” this crisis, he said.

But DeTrani recalled, with some anger, several incidents in the past when the North had taken military action, including its shootdown in 1969 of a US EC-121 reconnaissance plane that killed 31 Americans on board (according to newly released US documents, that incident almost led President Richard Nixon to retaliate with nuclear weapons – but in the end, he did nothing).

DeTrani, who visited Pyongyang several times on behalf of the Obama administration, was one of about 150 people gathered at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an influential military think tank, to hear an address by South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha. In her speech, Kang agreed with US officials who believe that North Korea’s nuclear program has reached, in her words, “a tipping point.”

“Pyongyang seems fast approaching its stated goal of having nuclear-tipped ICBMs capable of targeting the continental U.S.,” she said. As President Moon Jae-in warned CSIS during his visit to Washington in June, she reiterated that “there cannot be another war on the Korean Peninsula” and pledged to take “public diplomacy and outreach” to “a whole new level.” Kang’s appearance seemed to solidify CSIS’s role as an unofficial liaison between Washington and Seoul. That relationship could become official when Victor Cha, CSIS’s Korea Chair, is named US ambassador to South Korea, as expected.

But given the policy differences between Moon and Trump and the constant disagreements within the US administration itself about how to deal with North Korea, it’s easy to see why Ri and the North Korean leadership might be confused about America’s intentions.

Their confusion was apparent on Tuesday, when the Washington Post reported from Switzerland that senior North Korean officials “have been quietly trying to arrange talks with Republican-linked analysts in Washington, in an apparent attempt to make sense of President Trump and his confusing messages to Kim Jong Un’s regime.” As one of those Republicans told the Post, “their number-one concern is Trump. They can’t figure him out.”

Among the Americans contacted were Bruce Klinger, a former CIA analyst who runs North Korea programs for the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and Douglas Paal, who once worked as an Asian analyst for the Reagan and Bush administrations. Paal chaired a meeting last week at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where two Japanese experts warned that the Abe government must be included in any US negotiations with North Korea (I covered it for Newstapa). Neither Klinger or Paal accepted Pyongyang’s invitation, according to the Post.

At another CSIS seminar on Tuesday, Sue Mi Terry, a former senior Korea analyst for the CIA who was the Korea Director for President Bush’s National Security Council, said she met with North Korean official in Sweden this past summer. While they said de-nuclearization was “off the table,” Terry said, the officials “were willing to meet to discuss a peace treaty.” But that idea has been rejected by the US government, largely because it’s seen as a strategy to “get the US to pull out troops” from South Korea, she said. But she was critical of Trump’s tweets about North Korea and his rhetoric at the UN, which she called “counterproductive.”

At the CSIS forum where Kang spoke, there was more talk of Trump’s UN speech. “It’s very important to lower the temperature,” said Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State who in 2000 became the highest-level US official to ever visit Pyongyang. She took issue with US officials and pundits who claim that the Clinton administration’s 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea was a failure. Under that agreement, North Korea “made no new fissile material, no ICBMs and no missiles,” she said. During her talks with former leader Kim Jong Il, she added, Kim said “we could keep US forces in South Korea.”

Trump’s rhetoric has also raised concerns for US public. On Monday, CBS News published a new poll showing that 53 percent of Americans were concerned that Trump might act too quickly “and start an unneeded war in Korea.” According to CBS, “a majority disapprove of President Trump’s handling of the [North Korea] situation, and more voice concern that the U.S. would go to war too quickly than too slowly.”