N. Korea threatens to scrap Trump summit over drills
SEOUL — North Korea on Wednesday 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 relinquish 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 canceled the talks hours before the two Koreas were to meet to discuss how to implement their leaders’ agreements to reduce military tensions along their heavily fortified border and improve their overall ties.