President Moon Jae-in and first lady Kim Jung-sook disembark from a plane after arriving at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, Tuesday, for Moon’s summit with U.S. President Donald Trump. / Yonhap

By Kim Rahn

WASHINGTON, D.C. ― South Korean government sees the Washington-Pyongyang summit will be held almost for sure despite North Korea’s recent threat to reconsider it in protest of some U.S. officials’ comments on denuclearization models and refusal of talks with Seoul.

Chung Eui-yong, President Moon Jae-in’s security chief, showed the positive expectation, Monday.

He told this to reporters on a plane bound for Washington, D.C., where Moon and U.S. President Donald Trump will hold bilateral talks Tuesday over North Korea’s nuclear programs issue. The meeting comes about three weeks before Trump’s planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore on June 12, and after Moon’s summit with Kim on April 27.

Asked about the chance of the Trump-Kim summit to be held amid North Korea’s recent protest, Chung said, “We see 99.9 percent of chance.”

Pyongyang, which showed reconciliatory stance since the beginning of the year, has recently changed to rather hostile, threatening to reconsider the Kim-Trump summit and refusing talks with Seoul. It protested some hawkish U.S. officials claim to apply a Libyan model of denuclearization to North Korea, under which compensations and incentives would not be provided until the country removes all of its nuclear weapons.

Regarding some American media reports that Trump and his aides were skeptical of the outcome of the Trump-Kim summit considering North Korea’s flip-flopping attitude, Chung said Seoul officials have not felt such skepticism so far in their contacts with Washington officials.

As to North Korea’s changed stance, Chung said, “We are trying to understand the North’s position.”

He said the allies are tasked with setting joint strategies how to make the Washington-Pyongyang summit successful and how to carry out agreements reached at it afterward.

Although the two leaders talked about the issues over the phone for multiple times and their aides have been doing so as well, the face-to-face talks are expected to help them build more trust in the joint strategies.

“In usual summits, working- and high-level officials make almost all agreements in advance; but there is no pre-set scenario in this meeting, and Moon and Trump will exchange their ideas,” Chung said.