Freeland advises caution in wake of Korea summit

Canada’s foreign affairs minister welcomes leaders’ pledge to end war

The world needs to be “careful” to ensure historic talks between North and South Korea lead to a nuclear-free peninsula, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said Friday as she welcomed a pledge by the leaders of the two nations to work toward a formal end to hostilities.

“We all need to be careful and not assume anything,” Freeland said in Washington when asked whether Canada has any concerns with what has emerged as the early stages of a fledgling peace process.

The focus has to remain on the issue of nuclear proliferation, said Freeland, who was in the U.S. capital for the ongoing NAFTA negotiations.

“That is the Canadian concern, that is the focus of Canadian sanctions and that is the focus of this diplomatic process, which we really welcome and encourage,” she told reporters.

“To that end, we also call on North Korea to demonstrate concrete action toward completely, verifiably and irreversibly dismantling its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs,” Freeland later added in a statement.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in issued a joint statement Friday pledging to rid the shared peninsula of nuclear weapons and seek a formal end to the Korean War by year’s end. Fighting in the 1950-53 war was halted by an armistice, but without an actual peace treaty.

The statement did not provide specific details on achieving these goals.

Their historic meeting, which, for the first time, saw a North Korean leader venture south of the demarcation line between the two Koreas, came after a year of oftenescalating tensions between the U.S. and North Korea over the North’s testing of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, ramping up fears of a potential attack on the U.S. mainland.

The North has spent decades building up an atomic arsenal as a deterrent against an invasion, either from its southern counterpart or from the United States.