N. Korea threatens to cancel summit with Trump

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea threatened Wednesday to call off a planned summit between its leader, Kim Jong Un, and President Donald Trump, rejecting the administration’s demand for what it called “unilateral nuclear abandonment.”

Trump and his national security adviser, John Bolton, have repeatedly said that the U.S. goal in the scheduled talks is for North Korea to fully give up its nuclear program, which the North has spent decades building.

Bolton recently held out Libya, which did abandon a much less advanced nuclear program more than a decade ago, as an example for Pyongyang to follow. A few years later, Libya’s leader, Moammar Gadhafi, was overthrown by rebels backed by Western governments, making the example a deeply unpalatable one for North Korea.

The North Korea statement denounced the U.S. negotiating approach.

“If the U.S. is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but reconsider our proceeding to the DPRK-U.S. summit,” wrote Kim Kye Gwan, a longtime North Korean diplomat who serves as the first vice minister for foreign affairs, using the abbreviation for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Trump, responding to a question during a photo session with the visiting president of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, said the U.S. had not heard anything official from North Korea.

“We haven’t been notified at all, we’ll have to see. We haven’t received anything, we haven’t heard anything. We will see what happens,” Trump said. “We’ll see what happens.”

Earlier, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said the North Korean statement was “something that we fully expected.”

“If they want to meet we’ll be ready, and if they don’t, that’s OK too,” she said.

In a further public show of lack of concern, the State Department released a statement on a telephone call Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had with the foreign minister of Singapore on Wednesday. In the call, Pompeo thanked Singapore for its “willingness to host President Trump’s meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on June 12,” the statement said.

The North Korean statement went considerably beyond an earlier release by the official North Korean state media agency which complained about an annual military exercise with South Korea.