‘Win for Kim’ as concessions made
SEOUL: North Korean state media yesterday lauded the summit between Kim Jongun and Donald Trump as a resounding success, highlighting concessions by the US president and the prospect of a new era of peace and prosperity on the Korean peninsula.
According to a report by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Trump expressed his intention to halt USSouth Korea joint military exercises, offer security guarantees to the North and lift sanctions against it as relations improve.
The US president had said in a news conference on Tuesday he would like to lift sanctions against North Korea but it would not happen immediately.
Kim and Trump invited each other to their respective countries and both leaders ‘‘gladly accepted’’, KCNA reported.
The summit, the first between a sitting US president and a North Korean leader, was in stark contrast to North Korean nuclear and missile tests and angry exchanges of insults between Trump and Kim last year that fuelled worries about war.
‘‘Kim Jongun and Trump had the shared recognition to the effect that it is important to abide by the principle of stepbystep and simultaneous action in achieving peace, stability and denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula,’’ KCNA said.
Trump confirmed the US would not hold war games with South Korea while North Korea negotiated in good faith on denuclearisation.
‘‘We’re not going to be doing the war games as long as we’re negotiating in good faith,’’ Trump told Fox News Channel in Singapore after the summit.
‘‘So that’s good for a number of reasons, in addition to which we save a tremendous amount of money,’’ Trump said. ‘‘You know, those things, they cost. I hate to appear a businessman, but I kept saying, what’s it costing?’’
US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said Trump’s cost reasoning for halting the exercises was ‘‘ridiculous’’.
‘‘It’s not a burden on to the American taxpayer to have a forward deployed force in South Korea,’’ Graham told CNN. ‘‘It brings stability. It’s a warning to China that you can’t just take over the whole region. So I reject that analysis that it costs too much, but I do accept the proposition, let’s stand down [on military exercises] and see if we can find a better way here.’’
There was some confusion over precisely what military cooperation with South Korea Trump had promised to halt.
The USSouth Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every year with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which wrapped up last month. Another major drill is due in August.
The US maintains around 28,500 soldiers in South Korea, which remains in a technical state of war with the North after their 195053 conflict ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty.
Trump’s announcement was a surprise even to President Moon Jaein’s Government in Seoul, which worked to help bring about the TrumpKim summit.
Critics in the United States said Trump had given away too much at a meeting that gave Kim international standing. The North Korean leader had been isolated, his country accused by rights groups of widespread human rights abuses and under UN sanctions for its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.
‘‘For North Korea, they got exactly what they wanted,’’ said Moon Seongmook, a former South Korean military official and current head of the Unification Strategy Centre in Seoul. ‘‘They had a summit as a nuclear state with Kim on equal turf with Trump, got the United States to halt joint military exercises with South Korea. It’s a win for Kim Jongun.’’
Japan’s Minister of Defence Itsunori Onodera said that, while North Korea had pledged denuclearisation, no concrete steps had been taken and Japan would not let down its guard.
‘‘We see US South Korean joint exercises and the US military presence in South Korea as vital to security in East Asia,’’ Onodera told reporters. Japan, along with China, was expected to bear much of the initial costs of North Korea’s denuclearisation but would start shouldering costs only after the International Atomic Energy Agency restarted inspections, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters. — Reuters