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US President Donald Trump holds up a letter he received from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during a White House Cabinet meeting on Jan. 2. (Yonhap News)
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North Korean leader has sent 7 letters to White House in half a year
Following US President Donald Trump’s announcement on Jan. 2 that he had received a personal letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, attention is focusing on Kim’s “correspondence politics.” Kim has sent seven personal letters to the White House in half a year, establishing this correspondence as one of the major pillars of North Korea-US relations and making the exchange of letters a routine occurrence. The letter from Kim that received the most attention was the one sent in early June 2018. This letter arrived when a battle of nerves between North Korea and the US threatened to destabilize the situation shortly before their first summit, scheduled for June 12. When the Trump administration took a hard line by advocating the Libya model, which is regarded as signifying the unilateral abandonment of nuclear weapons, the North fired back with sharply worded statements by First Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Kim Kye-gwan and Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Choe Son-hui. This prompted Trump to cancel the summit on May 24. Kim immediately tried to calm the situation through a statement by a deputy, but it wasn’t until Workers’ Party of Korea Vice Chairman Kim Yong-chol delivered a personal letter from Kim during a visit to the White House on June 1 that the Singapore summit got back on track. The size of the white envelope holding the letter – as big as a manila envelope – got people talking. On that day, Trump revealed that his approach to denuclearization was shifting from a package deal to a process and hinted for the first time that an end-of-war declaration might be made during the Singapore summit. This was the letter that brought about the most dramatic reversal in North Korea-US relations. Kim’s fourth personal letter, which the White House announced on Sept. 10, also appeared to have the ambitious goal of turning around an apparently deteriorating situation. There were increasing concerns about relations between the two countries following reports that a “secret letter” sent by Kim Yong-chol had been largely responsible for the cancellation of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s fourth visit to North Korea just one day after it was announced at the end of August. The White House announced at the time that Kim Jong-un had proposed holding a second summit in his personal letter to Trump and that the two sides were working on arranging that summit. While it appeared that a second major turnaround was imminent, this momentum was not sustainable. In September, at least two other letters were apparently delivered. While their content has not been made public, Kim appears to have been trying to mitigate the deadlock between North Korea and the US. These two letters are the one that Trump said he’d received from Kim while stumping for candidates in the midterm elections on Sept. 21 and another he mentioned during a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe five days later. It hasn’t been confirmed whether these actually represent three different letters. At any rate, Trump attracted worldwide attention when he pulled a letter out of his suit pocket with Abe sitting beside him and bragged about it being a “historic letter.” This was the very day that Pompeo’s fourth visit to North Korea was reconfirmed and announced following Kim’s meeting in Pyongyang with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, prompting some to conclude that Kim’s “relay correspondence” had created a breakthrough in North Korea-US high-level talks. On the other hand, the second personal letter that Kim handed Pompeo during his third visit to North Korea on July 6 was presumably aimed at maintaining the cordial mood between Kim and Trump following their first summit. Nevertheless, since this was a time of growing disagreement between the two sides about the corresponding measures that the US would take in return for North Korea’s denuclearization, that letter apparently failed to achieve its desired results. It remains to be seen what impact will be had by Kim’s seventh letter, which was delivered at the start of the New Year. By Kim Ji-eun, staff reporter Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]
