Trump Cancels North Korea Summit, Reason will shock You
President Donald Trump on Thursday has cancelled his planned summit with North Korea. This is contained in a letter to the North Korea’s leader.
The meeting, initially set for June 12 in Singapore, was aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear program in return for rolling back sanctions.
The proposed summit which was supposed to see North Korea relinquish its nuclear weapons, in exchange for economic revival has hit the rocks with the recent cancellation by Mr Trump.
It must be said expressly that the increased conflagrating statements from North Korea’s Leadership contributed in collapsing the summit.
North Korea’s rhetoric over the past week looked threatening. Only this week, North Korea’s senior envoy for U.S. affairs threatened to cancel the summit and warned that the country could inflict on America an “appalling tragedy that it has never experienced nor even imagined.”
In his letter to Mr. Kim, Mr. Trump wrote, “I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters. Someday I look very much forward to meeting you.”
He added that if Mr. Kim changed his mind with respect to the summit “please do not hesitate to call me or write.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed hope that diplomatic interactions with Pyongyang would continue and that the summit could be rescheduled. He also said the U.S. would keep up its efforts to put maximum economic pressure on North Korea until it agreed to give up its nuclear programs. “The pressure campaign continues,” he said.
One White House official added that it was “wise” of Mr. Trump “to walk away for the time being.”
Another senior White House official said the president wants a summit to happen but only under the right circumstances. Even after seeing encouraging developments following Mr. Pompeo’s visits to Pyongyang, much had also happened to make a meeting unfeasible at present, the official said. It was the president’s decision alone to cancel the meeting, which he did Thursday morning, the official added.
Mr. Pompeo declined to say whether the Trump administration had consulted with its South Korean ally before deciding to cancel the summit. Mr. Moon met with Mr. Trump during a White House visit Tuesday in a bid to keep the summit planning on track.
Discussions about the letter Mr. Trump sent to Mr. Kim were carried out within the administration Wednesday night and Thursday morning, Mr. Pompeo said. “There is still lots of discussion going on inside the administration about how to proceed,” he said, adding that some decisions on the administration’s next steps have yet to be made.
Even after the U.S. and North Korea had agreed on a summit date and venue, it was clear that substantial gaps remained.
A major divide, according to experts, is whether the U.S. and North Korea shared the same understanding of “denuclearization.” The Trump administration envisioned a rapid process—perhaps taking less than a year—in which important sanctions relief would come only at the end. Mr. Kim spoke about a prolonged process in which sanctions relief would come earlier.
Both sides in recent weeks had been seeking to shape the summit agenda. On Thursday morning, Mr. Pompeo told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the U.S. had sought for “many days” to arrange meetings between teams of U.S. and North Korean officials to prepare for the summit but had received no response from Pyongyang.
China’s foreign minister said Wednesday that he hoped the summit would take place. “There is already good basis and necessary conditions at the moment,” Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, said in a joint appearance with Mr. Pompeo on Wednesday. “And I told our U.S. colleagues that if you want to solve the problem, now is the time. If you want peace, now is the time. If you want to make history, now is the time.”
The summit’s cancellation also damps hope in Japan for progress in tackling the threat Tokyo faces from North Korea’s missiles and for a resolution of a dispute over Japanese citizens abducted by Pyongyang.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe praised Messrs. Trump and Moon for their diplomatic efforts with North Korea, although officials in Japan have privately been skeptical of major breakthroughs from summit talks. Mr. Abe opted to await the result of the U.S.-North Korea summit before attempting to engage North Korea in his own direct diplomacy.
On Thursday, North Korea’s state media said that Pyongyang had “completely shut down” its nuclear test site in northern North Korea, an effort to demonstrate to the world that it is willing to make sincere concessions. Skeptics point out the site had been damaged by the North’s latest test in September and might already have been unusable. Others speculated that the regime, having declared its nuclear program complete, didn’t need the site anyway.
South Korea’s foreign ministry said it welcomed the closure of the site and called it a meaningful step toward denuclearization.
The key sticking point in any U.S.-North Korean talks, experts say, is that Pyongyang wants official recognition as a nuclear-weapons state—a prospect the U.S. is unwilling to entertain—while Washington is seeking a deal that would result in Pyongyang relinquishing its nuclear arsenal. The North has repeatedly said it considers its nuclear deterrent a “treasured sword.”
“There is no way they will give up their nukes,” said Jang Sung-min, a top aide to former South Korean leader Kim Dae-jung and current chairman of the World and Northeast Asia Peace Forum in Seoul.
ALSO READ:
