HEY, KIM, TALK IS CHEAP
Disarm before meet: Trump
The White House said Friday that North Korea would have to take “concrete” steps to dismantle its nuclear arsenal before President Trump would meet with dictator Kim Jong-un.
“Look, they have to follow through on the promises that they made. And we want to see concrete and verifiable action on that front,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said when asked if it was possible the meeting might not come off.
“There are a lot of things possible. But I can tell you that the president has accepted that invitation on the basis that we have concrete and verifiable steps.”
She added that the time and place still had to be determined.
Thursday’s bombshell announcement that Trump was willing to meet with Kim followed South Korea’s revelation that the North Korean despot was willing to negotiate denuclearization under certain terms.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who brokered the meeting with the US, said that the North would negotiate “if the military threat to the North was eliminated and its security guaranteed.”
But Sanders asserted the North had “promised” to end its nuclearweapons program and stop testing missiles without conditions.
“They have made some major promises. They have made promises to denuclearize. They have made promises to stop nuclear and missile testing,” she said.
“The president is hopeful that we make some continued progress with what we know is that the maximum pressure campaign has clearly been effective,” Sanders said.
Vice President Mike Pence said earlier that the talks are “evidence that President Trump’s strategy to isolate the Kim regime is working.”
Pence said the US had made “zero concessions” and “consistently increased the pressure” on Kim.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, meanwhile, said Friday that Trump’s sudden decision to meet with Kim was the commander-inchief ’s alone.
“The decision to engage between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, that’s a decision the president took himself,” Tillerson said in Djibouti, a stop on his tour of African nations.
Tillerson — who had said the previous day that now was not the time to negotiate with the North — then tried to draw a distinction between “talks” and “negotiations.”
“With respect to talks with North Korea versus negotiations — and I think this seems to be something that people continue to struggle with the difference,” he said in remarks released by the State Department.
“My comments have been that we’re — the conditions are not right for negotiations, but we’ve been saying for some time we are open to talks.”
If the meeting comes off, it would be a first between a US president and a North Korean leader.
One foreign-policy expert warned that Kim would never surrender his nukes.
“There is some chance he [Trump] will think that he has a unique opportunity to make progress on North Korea’s nuclear program, when in fact he’s going down the same road that the Clinton and Bush administrations have. North Korea is not giving up its nuclear weapons. Period,” Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute told The Washington Post.