White House shrugs at threat by N. Korea to cancel summit

WASHINGTON — The White House brushed aside threats by North Korea on Wednesday to cancel an upcoming summit meeting between President Donald Trump and the North’s leader, Kim Jong Un, saying it is still “hopeful” the meeting will happen — but that Trump would be fine if it did not.

When Trump was asked Wednesday about the prospects for the summit to go off as planned, he was noncommittal, telling reporters in the Oval Office, “We’ll have to see.” Trump said he would still insist on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in the talks.

In its warning Wednesday, North Korea said Kim could withdraw from the meeting over Washington’s demand that it unilaterally abandon its nuclear arsenal.

U.S. officials acknowledged that the North appeared to be seeking to exploit a gap in the administration’s messages about North Korea — between the hard-line views of national security adviser John Bolton and the more conciliatory tone of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

In a recent television interview, Bolton said North Korea should receive no benefits, including the lifting of sanctions, until it had surrendered its entire nuclear infrastructure.

Pompeo, by contrast, put the emphasis on the U.S. investment that would flow into North Korea if it agreed to relinquish its nuclear arsenal. He, too, said that the North would have to agree to “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization,” the technical shorthand used by the administration to describe its bargaining position with Pyongyang.

The president has shifted between a hard-line and more conciliatory tone in his statements about the North, although in recent days he has expressed excitement about a potential breakthrough with Kim. He has not yet responded to the warning Wednesday issued by the North’s first vice foreign minister, Kim Kye Gwan, which took direct aim at Bolton.

“We do not hide our feelings of repugnance toward him,” Kim Kye Gwan said.

The press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was hardly more forthcoming.

“If they want to meet, we’ll be ready,” she told reporters Wednesday, “and if they don’t, that’s OK, too.” She said the White House “fully expected” North Korea to take this tack — an assertion belied by the scrambling of officials when the first reports came in from Pyongyang on Tuesday evening.

Few analysts said North Korea would ultimately go so far as to cancel the Singapore meeting. Rather, the threat to withdraw was an attempt to raise the price that Washington would have to pay to get any significant concessions on the North’s nuclear program, analysts said.

North Korea’s abrupt change in tone began Tuesday, when it postponed high-level talks with South Korea, blaming the joint military drills known as Max Thunder with the U.S. that began last week.