Pyongyang renews summit threat, slams Pence
SEOUL — North Korea called US Vice-President Mike Pence “ignorant and stupid” for his warnings over a planned summit with Donald Trump, renewing a threat to cancel as the US president said the fate of the historic talks will be decided next week.
Mr. Trump is due to meet his North Korean counterpart Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12 for high-stakes talks aimed at ridding the reclusive state of its newly acquired nuclear weapons and improving ties after decades of animosity. The summit announcement came after months of unusually cordial diplomacy between the historic foes brokered by South Korea.
But the newfound bonhomie and the meeting’s potential success has been thrown into doubt in recent days with both Washington and Pyongyang raising the prospect of cancelling the talks and trading threats.
The latest broadside from North Korea came Thursday with vice-minister of Foreign Affairs Choe Son Hui lambasting a Monday media interview in which Mr. Pence warned Mr. Kim Jong Un that it would be a “great mistake” to try and play Mr. Trump. Mr. Pence also said North Korea could end up like Libya, whose former leader Moamer Khadafi was killed by US- backed rebels years after giving up atomic weapons, “if Mr. Kim Jong Un doesn’t make a deal.”
“I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks gushing out from the mouth of the US vice-president,” Ms. Choe said in a statement released by the state-run KCNA news agency.
“We will neither beg the US for dialogue nor take the trouble to persuade them if they do not want to sit together with us,” she said, adding she would recommend that Mr. Kim cancel the talks if Washington continues to make such threats.
Similar comments comparing North Korea to Libya from Mr. Trump’s hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton caused the first threat by Pyongyang last week to cancel the Singapore meeting. “Whether the US will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behavior of the United States,” she added.
Politically, Mr. Trump has invested heavily in the success of the planned summit, and so privately most US officials, as well as outside observers, believe it will go ahead.
Hand-picked aides — including deputy chief of staff Joe Hagin and deputy national security adviser Mira Ricardel — are traveling to the Southeast Asian city state designated to host the summit, officials said. They are expected to meet their North Korean counterparts and iron out details of the meeting.
But Mr. Trump has also become increasingly lukewarm about meeting Mr. Kim, teasing his commitment to talks as keenly as any of his The Apprentice season finales. “On Singapore we’ll see. It could very well happen,” he said Wednesday, adding cryptically: “Whatever it is, we’ll know next week.”
Mr. Trump enthusiastically embraced the idea of talks earlier this year — the first ever meeting between a US president and a leader of North Korea.
But as the date draws nearer, the yawning gulf in expectations between the two sides is coming into sharp relief. Washington has made it clear that it wants to see the “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” of North Korea. —