South Korean leader Moon Jae-in heads to Washington for a crucial summit with U.S. President Donald Trump this week in hopes of persuading the mercurial leader to give some ground in his negotiations with North Korea over that country's nuclear arsenal.
But Moon, who has seen his influence in the negotiation process wane, faces a daunting task in his attempt to bridge the gap in the two sides' thinking in the wake of February's Kim-Trump summit in Hanoi.
That summit, at which the Washington and Pyongyang had been widely expected to reach some kind of agreement, ended in a failure to reconcile North Korean demands for sanctions relief with U.S. demands for Kim to give up his weapons of mass destruction.