South Korean leader urges Biden to negotiate with North Korea
President Moon Jae-in said he hopes President Biden will build on Trump-era engagement with Pyongyang, in an interview published as Moon entered his final year in office.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in urged President Biden to negotiate directly with North Korea and build on diplomatic groundwork laid during the Trump administration, according to an interview with The New York Times published April 21, 2021, and reported by Just The News.
Moon said he hopes Biden will be remembered as a president who achieved "substantive and irreversible progress for the complete denuclearization and peace settlement on the Korean Peninsula," per the interview. He said Trump had failed to finalize any accord with North Korea but that Biden could build on the progress Trump made in his dealings with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Reporting did not specify what concrete next steps Moon proposed beyond direct engagement, and the interview did not detail whether Moon and Biden had discussed a specific timeline for renewed talks.
What Moon is asking Biden to do differently
Moon emphasized that Biden needed to engage directly with Kim rather than delegate diplomacy to lower-level officials, according to the reporting. He also urged both Washington and Pyongyang to develop what the interview described as a "mutually trusted road map" toward denuclearization and the eventual easing of international sanctions on North Korea.
In his own words
We will see this effort come to fruition under Biden's leadership.
Moon made that statement in the interview, expressing confidence that continued diplomacy would eventually pay off, per the reporting reviewed.
What it signals
Moon's appeal came during his final year as South Korea's president, a fact that underscores the urgency behind his push: Trump had met Kim twice, in Singapore in 2018 and Vietnam in 2019, without a signed deal, and North Korea had curtailed missile testing during that period, according to the reporting. Biden, for his part, had signaled openness to diplomacy but said he did not intend to meet directly with Kim, according to Reuters reporting referenced in the coverage -- a gap between Moon's request for direct engagement and Biden's stated posture that the available reporting does not resolve.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by Just The News, citing an interview published by The New York Times. It restores a story originally published on this site in April 2021; figures are as reported at the time.