North Korea offers different view of Singapore summit
SINGAPORE — North Korea made clear Wednesday it viewed the commitments that President Donald Trump and ruler Kim Jong Un made about denuclearization and sanctions during their summit in strikingly different terms than the White House, suggesting trouble going forward.
After the two leaders signed a joint statement Tuesday that said North Korea would “work toward” denuclearization, the country’s official media said that Trump and Kim had the “shared recognition” that the process would be “step-by-step and simultaneous action,” language not in the leaders’ statement.
The Korean Central News Agency report repeated North Korea’s position that denuclearization must involve the entire Korean Peninsula, and not just the northern half. It also emphasized that the U.S. would “lift sanctions” as part of the process, although the official statement does not mention sanctions.
Trump and Kim met for nearly 40 minutes in private, with only interpreters in the room, at the start of their summit on Singapore’s Sentosa Island. Other aides and official note-takers were kept out, so it’s impossible to know if the difference in interpretation or emphasis emerged from that discussion.
Adding to the confusion, the leaders’ vaguely worded joint statement contained no concrete plan or timeline for nuclear disarmament, or even a definition of what denuclearization would entail.
After the summit had concluded, Trump told reporters in a 65-minute news conference that he had agreed to North Korea’s longtime demands to stop military exercises with South Korea. The “war games” have been a mainstay of the U.S. alliance with Seoul for decades.
Trump said halting the drills — which also was not mentioned in the official statement — would save “a lot of money,” and he called them “provocative,” the complaint North Korea has often made. He also said he hopes eventually to withdraw about 32,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea, although not as part of the current agreement with Kim.
In only the second full solo news conference of his presidency, Trump said that he had been awake for 25 hours — he turns 72 on Thursday — and that he was bullish about his day of diplomacy with the young autocrat from Pyongyang.
He lavished praise on Kim as a “great talent,” denied concerns about treating him as an equal and painted a rosy picture of North Korea’s potential future — one laid out in a bizarre, propaganda-style video that the White House had prepared for the North Korean leader.
Asked why he trusted a ruler who had murdered family members and jailed thousands of political prisoners, Trump lauded Kim for taking over the regime at age 26, when his father died in 2011, and being “able to run it, and run it tough.”
While Trump repeatedly portrayed his two-page agreement with Kim as “comprehensive,” it contained little new except a commitment by both sides to continue diplomatic engagement, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo leading the U.S. side in future talks.
That is no small achievement considering that the two leaders were threatening each other with nuclear war last summer. But it was far less than the ambitious arms control deal Trump hoped to gain when he agreed to the summit in March.
The document instead reiterated the same vague North Korean commitment to denuclearize that Kim made after he met South Korea’s president in April, but it offered no specifics of how or when any disarmament might take place.
“We will do it as fast as it can mechanically and physically be done,” Trump said, adding it would “take a long time” to wind down the nuclear weapons program. Until recently, Trump had demanded Pyongyang quickly dismantle its vast nuclear infrastructure.