Talks in crisis

North Korea threatens to cancel Trump-Kim summit over South Korea’s military drills.

SEOUL: North Korea cancelled a high-level meeting with South Korea and threatened to scrap a historic summit next month between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un over military exercises between Seoul and Washington that Pyongyang has long claimed are invasion rehearsals.

A senior North Korean diplomat said Pyongyang will refuse to be pressured into abandoning its nukes.

The surprise declaration, which came in a pre-dawn dispatch in North Korea’s state media, appears to cool what had been an unusual flurry of outreach from a country that last year conducted a provocative series of weapons tests that had many fearing the region was on the edge of war.

It’s still unclear, however, whether the North intends to scuttle all diplomacy or merely wants to gain leverage ahead of the planned June 12 talks between Kim and Trump.

North Korea’s first vice-foreign minister, Kim Kye-gwan, said Pyongyang has no interest in a summit with Washington if it’s going to be a “one-sided” affair where it’s pressured to give up its nukes.

He criticised recent comments by Trump’s top security adviser, John Bolton, and other US officials who have been talking about how the North should follow the “Libyan model” of nuclear disarmament and provide a “complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement.”

He also took issue with US views that the North should fully relin- No peace in sight: South Korean marine force members looking at the North’s side through binoculars at the Imjingak Pavilion in Paju near the border village of Panmunjom, South Korea.

quish its biological and chemical weapons.

“We will appropriately respond to the Trump administration if it approaches the North Korea-US summit meeting with a truthful intent to improve relations,” he said.

“But we are no longer interested in a negotiation that will be all about driving us into a corner and making a one-sided demand for us to give up our nukes and this would force us to reconsider whether we would accept the North Korea-US summit meeting.”

The North cancelled the talks hours before the two Koreas were to meet at a border village to discuss how to implement their leaders’ recent agreements to reduce military tensions along their heavily

fortified border and improve their overall ties.

It called the two-week Max Thunder drills, which began Monday and reportedly include about 100 aircraft, an “intended military provocation” and an “apparent challenge” to last month’s summit between Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, when the leaders met on their border in their countries’ third summit talks since their formal division in 1948.

South Korea’s Defense Ministry said the drills will go on as planned.

“The United States must carefully contemplate the fate of the planned North Korea-US summit amid the provocative military ruckus that it’s causing with South Korean authorities,” the North said yesterday.

“We’ll keenly monitor how the United States and South Korean authorities will react.”

South Korea called North Korea’s move “regrettable” and demanded a quick return to talks.

US Army Col Rob Manning said the current exercise is part of the US and South Korea’s “routine, annual training programme to maintain a foundation of military readiness.”

Manning, a Pentagon spokesman, said the purpose of Max Thunder and exercise Foal Eagle – another training event – is to enhance the two nations’ abilities to operate together to defend South Korea.

“The defensive nature of these combined exercises has been clear for many decades and has not changed,” Manning said.

The North’s statement yesterday comes amid a slew of surprising moves in recent weeks.

On Tuesday, South Korea’s military said North Korea was moving ahead with plans to close its nuclear test site next week, an assessment backed by US researchers who say satellite images show the North has begun dismantling facilities at the site.

The site’s closure was set to come before the Kim-Trump summit, which had been shaping up as a crucial moment in the decades-long push to resolve the nuclear standoff with the North, which is closing in on the ability to viably target the mainland United States with its long-range nuclear-armed missiles. — AP