U.S. ties strings to N. Korea talks

Only if conditions ‘right,’ Trump says after envoy’s outreach

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Monday responded to an overture from North Korea for talks with the U.S., saying that will happen only “under the right conditions.”

Trump spoke about North Korea at an annual White House meeting with the nation’s governors after a North Korean envoy sent a message through South Korea on Sunday. The envoy said the North has “ample intentions” of holding talks with the U.S.

The White House said in response that it would take a wait-and-see approach. Trump followed up Monday.

“We want to talk only under the right conditions,” Trump said. The administration’s position is that North Korea must get rid of its nuclear and missile programs before any talks can take place. The U.S. has applied a series of sanctions, including a fresh round on Friday, in what it says is a “maximum pressure campaign” to force North Korea to disarm.

The Trump administration says it’s open to talks with North Korea, primarily to explain how America will maintain its pressure on the country until North Korea takes steps toward eliminating its nuclear weapons. U.S. officials differentiate talks from negotiations. For those to occur, they first want Pyongyang to accept that its nuclear program will be on the table.

Speaking to the governors, Trump praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for bolstering his country’s sanctions against the North and warned that Russia is “behaving badly” on the issue of sanctions.

“Russia is sending in what China is taking out,” Trump said.

During Sunday’s closing ceremony for the Olympic Games, the office of South Korean President Moon Jae-in announced that a North Korean delegate to the Olympics said his country is willing to hold talks with the U.S. The move comes after decades of tensions between the two countries, which have no formal diplomatic relations, and after a year of escalating rhetoric, including threats of war, between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

On Monday, Moon said the United States must “lower its bar for dialogue” and North Korea must signal that denuclearization is on the agenda.

After talking with Ivanka Trump, the American president’s daughter and adviser, and separately with a senior North Korean official over the weekend, Moon hosted Chinese Vice Premier Liu Yandong in his office Monday.

“The United States needs to lower its bar for dialogue and North, too, must show its willingness to denuclearize,” Moon told Liu during their meeting, a spokesman for the South Korean president said. “It is important for enabling the U.S. and North Korea to sit down face to face.”

Time is short for the South Korean president, given that his military is due to start exercises with the United States on April 1, an event that elicits an angry response from North Korea every year. Plus, North Korea has a history of putting all inter-Korean issues on ice during the two months of drills.

In a frenzy of diplomacy, Moon has been in contact with representatives of four of the countries that had been involved in the now-defunct six-party talks on North Korea’s denuclearization. The other two parties are Japan and Russia.

But North Korea, while apparently open to the idea of talks, has not agreed that its nuclear weapons are up for negotiation.

Kim Yong Chol, the leader of a North Korean delegation now visiting Seoul and an official blacklisted by both the United States and South Korea for his role in the nuclear program, seemed to obfuscate on Monday.

When South Korea’s national security adviser asked Kim over lunch, Kim said that denuclearization may be the end goal of talks but that there are “many ways” of starting the process. He did not explain what those ways might be, a presidential Blue House official told reporters.