Hopes are high a detailed final agreement on the regime's denuclearization would be the result of the upcoming Washington-Pyongyang summit.
But it's hard to ignore how such deals were made in past only to break down.
Lee Ji-won helps shed light on what negotiators must do to make the talks work this time around. North Korea and the U.S. agreed on Pyongyang's denuclearization back in 1994 by signing the Agreed Framework.
That agreement stipulated that North Korea would freeze operation and construction of its nuclear reactors, and in exchange, the U.S. would supply the North with heavy-fuel oil and help construct two light-water reactors.
While both sides worked to implement the promises, the U.S.'s lack of funding to build the reactors and the North's alleged acknowledgement of having a uranium enrichment program, led to the break down of the agreement.
The two sides, in the six-party talks, also made other agreements aimed at denuclearizing the Korean peninsula,... without success.
"The North and the U.S. didn't see eye-to-eye during the crafting of the agreements. The U.S.'s reward of a security guarantee and a peace treaty was not concrete or specific enough for North Korea, and because of those differences and the lack of trust, the past agreements were always destined to fail."
"The fundamental problem with past agreements was that North Korea's willingness to denuclearize wasn't that strong, and the international community's pressure to force the North to give up its weapons wasn't tough enough either."
The Panmunjom Declaration has brought about fresh hope of denuclearizing North Korea,... but for this to happen, experts say several key points must be included in the roadmap that's expected to come out of the Pyongyang-Washington summit.
"The North would want its denuclearization commitment to correspond with an equal 'complete, verifiable, irreversible' reward. The new agreement will need a fundamental guarantee of its security,... including a peace treaty and the normalization of ties."
Technical details including a specific timeline and verification methods were also among the points mentioned.
But what many experts highlighted was the importance of *trust* between the North and the U.S.
"Neither side had signed the past agreements with the intention to break them. But with each side's distrust that the other side would not keep its promises, misunderstandings or delays on implementation led both the North and the U.S. to lose the direction and the will to keep up with the agreement."
With the U.S. adamant it will not provide action-for-action rewards until the North fully denuclearizes, there are questions over how the two sides will reach an agreement.
Lee Ji-won, Arirang News.
