‘No substance in talks’
CRITICS: KIM, TRUMP SINGAPORE SUMMIT SEEN AS SHORT ON ANY DETAIL
An ‘epoch-making meeting’ that would help foster ‘a radical switchover ...’ – KCNA
Donald Trump accepted an invitation from Kim Jong-un to visit North Korea during their summit, Pyongyang state media reported yesterday, as the US president said the world had jumped back from the brink of “nuclear catastrophe”.
Critics have said the unprecedented encounter in Singapore was more style than substance, producing a document short on details about the key issue of Pyongyang’s atomic weapons.
But in a typically bullish tweet, Trump said the first-ever meeting between sitting leaders of the two Cold War foes meant “the world has taken a big step back from potential nuclear catastrophe!”
“No more rocket launches, nuclear testing or research! Hostages are back home with their families. Thank you to Chairman Kim, our day together was historic!”
In the joint statement following Tuesday’s talks, Kim agreed to the “complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula” – a stock phrase favoured by Pyongyang that stopped short of long-standing US demands for North Korea to give up its atomic arsenal in a “verifiable” and “irreversible” way.
The official KCNA news agency ran a glowing dispatch, describing the summit as an “epoch-making meeting” that would help foster “a radical switchover in the most hostile [North Korea]-US relations”. The report said the two men “gladly accepted" mutual invitations to visit each other’s countries.
KCNA also asserted Trump had “expressed his intention” to lift sanctions against the North – something the US president had told a press conference would happen “when we are sure that the nukes are no longer a factor”. “The sanctions right now remain.”
With the headline: Meeting of the century opens new history in DPRKUS relations, the North’s official daily Rodong Sinmun splashed no fewer than 33 pictures across four of its usual six pages.
One of the pictures showed a smiling Kim shaking hands with Trump’s hawkish national security advisor John Bolton, who has previously advocated military action against the North, which, in turn, has referred to him as “human scum”.
In Pyongyang, commuters crowded around the spread of images, for most of them the first they had seen of the summit.
U Sung Tak, 79, said the future was looking “bright” because Kim was “leading the world’s political trend on the Korean peninsula, steering the wheel of history”.
Ordinary North Koreans consistently voice unequivocal support for the leadership and its policies when speaking to foreign media.
Pyongyang has reason to feel confident after the summit, where the leader of the world’s most powerful democracy shook hands with the third generation of a dynastic dictatorship, standing as equals in front of their nations’ flags.
The spectacle was a major coup for an isolated and heavily sanctioned regime that has long craved international legitimacy.
No more rocket launches and nuke testing