TRUMP SOUGHT HIGH STAKES IN NUKE TALKS
But it floundered amid differences over sanctions and ‘denuclearisation’ term
UNITED States President Donald Trump urged North Korea’s Kim Jong-un to go “all in” during their high-stakes nuclear negotiations, but talks floundered amid differences over sanctions and the definition of “denuclearisation”, a senior State Department official said yesterday.
A senior administration official said the North Koreans wanted “many, many billions of dollars in sanctions relief” but were “unwilling to impose a complete freeze on their weapons of mass destruction programmes”.
Lifting the sanctions “would in effect put us in a position of subsidising the development of weapons of mass destruction in North Korea”, the official said.
“The weapons themselves need to be on the table. The president challenged the North Koreans to go bigger. The president encouraged Jong-un to go all in. And we were going to — we were prepared to go all in as well.”
North Korea’s foreign minister convened journalists for a surprise midnight press conference to present Pyongyang’s position that it had only requested partial sanctions relief.
In return, and in what minister Ri Yong-ho called a “realistic proposal”, the North had offered to “permanently and completely dismantle all nuclear production facilities in Yongbyon in the presence of United States experts”.
But one of the problems was a precise definition of what is located in Yongbyon — an enormous complex containing “more than 300 different separate facilities”, the US official noted.
A further sticking point was the ever-thorny issue of an exact definition of “denuclearisation”.
Despite the chasms, the official, like his boss Trump, sought to strike a positive tone.
“We’re actually encouraged by where we’re going. We didn’t get close enough at this summit but we’re encouraged by the opportunities ahead of us.”