Kim Jong Un, centre, and China's leader Xi Jinping presented a united front this week despite a recent chill in relations. Photo / AP
Kim Jong Un, centre, and China's leader Xi Jinping presented a united front this week despite a recent chill in relations. Photo / AP
The world is falling right into a carefully planned trap by North Korea, according to a former diplomat who knows Kim's tricks all too well.
The new-look North Korean leader wants the world to see how willing he is to embrace peace. Denuclearisation? "Sure, why not," Kim Jong Un appears to be saying.
He came out of his self-imposed shell last week for a "surprise" — albeit much-publicised — meeting in Beijing.
Pictures of Kim smiling next to Chinese President Xi Jinping showed the first meeting between North Korea's normally reclusive supreme leader and a major world power's head of state since the 34-year-old took power in 2011.
It was a rare show of co-operation for a man who has for so long played by his own rules. Next month he'll meet with South Korea's President Moon Jae In before a possible meeting with United States President Donald Trump.
But a man who knows the North's tricks all too well says world leaders are playing right into Kim's hands. South Korea's former foreign minister Yun Byung Se says: "This is a trap".
"Instead of wishful thinking, we should tread very cautiously," the one-time loyal servant to Park Geun Hye said, according to the South China Morning Post.
Yun refers to talks between Japan, the US and North Korea where they agreed to meet with the aim of complete denuclearisation.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, (left), and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands in Beijing. Photo / KCNA
During Kim's visit to China last week he again expressed support for a denuclearised Korean peninsula. But Yun believes he's trying to buy time ahead of other important meetings and that Kim's version of "denuclearisation" is very different to the rest of the world's.
Specifically, Yun says Trump fails to realise how complex the North's definition of denuclearisation is, and that it involves the withdrawal of United States troops from South Korea. "How can you accept the offer when you know all those preconditions," he said.
"We have had quite a few failures in the past. If we fail again, many people will start to talk about the worst scenario."
The two Koreas will hold a rare inter-Korean summit on April 27 at the South's Peace House in Panmunjom. Kim could meet with Trump as early as May.
The two sides did not settle on the summit agenda, but the South's delegation leader Cho Myoung Gyon told reporters they agreed Kim and Moon should be able to hold "frank discussions on all matters", including denuclearisation of the peninsula.
The meeting comes after inter-Korean summits in Pyongyang in 2000 and 2007, but the North has made extensive progress in its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capabilities since then.
US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said while the timing of the planned meeting between Trump and Kim has yet to be confirmed, "we look forward to that possibly happening sometime in the near future".
Kim's visit to China was the North Korean leader's first overseas trip since inheriting power after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, in 2011.
