Koreans Set the Table for a Deal That Trump Will Try to Close

On Friday at NATO, on his first full day as secretary of state, Mr. Pompeo suggested for the first time that the North Korean leader was ready to deal. “I did get a sense that he was serious,” he told reporters. “The economic pressure that has been put in place by this global effort that President Trump has led has led him to believe that it’s in his best interest to come to the table and talk about denuclearization.”

Yet talking is different from denuclearizing. And talking about denuclearizing is hardly new. The North promised the same in a 1992 agreement, and many in Seoul, the South’s capital, wondered then if the nightmare of living under the constant threat of artillery barrage was about to end. In fact, the agreement reached on Friday picks up language from the 1992 accord, and has similar provisions about reuniting families separated during the Korean War and nonaggression agreements. Little of it happened.

There were two agreements with the George W. Bush administration, each described at the time as breakthroughs. Since then the North has amassed 20 to 60 nuclear weapons, up from zero when those commitments were made.

No one knows those numbers better than Mr. Pompeo, who spent a lot of time with the C.I.A.’s Korea Mission unit, assessing the scope and imminence of its nuclear capabilities. “There’s a lot of history here, where promises have been made, hopes have been raised and then dashed,” the new secretary of state told reporters.

Mr. Trump’s solution to not getting “played,” the phrase he so often uses about his predecessors and North Korea, is to keep what he calls a “maximum pressure campaign” on the North until denuclearization happens. The South Koreans say they agree. But the documents issued Friday hint at benefits that begin to flow to the North as they move toward a peace agreement, and a reduction of tensions.

China, which is largely interested in maintaining the status quo, could also loosen the restrictions on oil and goods, as long as negotiations play out.

All this suggests that Mr. Trump’s challenge when he meets Mr. Kim, probably in early June, is growing. He must establish the process for the actual dismantlement of weapons, the removal of stockpiled uranium and plutonium bomb fuel from the country and a verification program that will be one of the most complex in history, given the vastness of North Korea’s mountains.

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