North Korea threatens to cancel summit
SEOUL >> North Korea is casting doubt on next month’s summit between leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump over joint Air Force drills taking place in South Korea, which it says are ruining the diplomatic mood.
North Korea always reacts angrily to the joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises, considering them as a rehearsal for an invasion. But this year, with the sudden burst of diplomacy, had appeared to be different.
The South Korean and U.S. militaries had scaled back and played down the exercises, declining the news media the usual access to the drills. North Korea barely said a word about the drills during the computer simulation exercises that took place through April.
The two-week-long Max Thunder drills between the two countries’ Air Forces, an annual event that began on Friday, have, however, clearly struck a nerve in North Korea.
“This exercise targeting us, which is being carried out across South Korea, is a flagrant challenge to the Panmunjom Declaration and an intentional military provocation running counter to the positive political development on the Korean Peninsula,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency said in a report published early.
The Max Thunder exercise involves about 100 warplanes, including eight F-22 radar-evading fighters and an unspecified number of B-52 bombers and F-15K jets, according to the South’s main Yonhap News Agency. During last year’s Max Thunder exercises, U.S. and South Korean fighter jets flew an average 60 sorties a day to showcase their firepower.
By mentioning the Panmunjom Declaration, North Korea was referring to the agreement signed last month by Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in following their historic summit.
They agreed to work to turn the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War in 1953 into a peace treaty that would officially bring the war to a close, and also to pursue the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula. North Korea suggested that the drills were putting the proposed summit between Trump and Kim, scheduled for June 12, in jeopardy. South Korea’s Defense Ministry said the drills will go on as planned.
“The United States will also have to undertake careful deliberations about the fate of the planned North Korea-U.S. summit in light of this provocative military ruckus jointly conducted with the South Korean authorities,” KCNA said.
Trump and Kim are due to meet in Singapore, which would be the first time a North Korean leader had meet with a sitting U.S. president.
Trump and his top aides, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, both previously known for their hard line views on North Korea, have express optimism that a denuclearization agreement can be worked out.
In surprising detail, Pompeo — who says Kim watches foreign news reports — has laid out the economic and development aid that would flow to the North Korean regime if it permanently and verifiably gives up its nuclear weapons program.
But North Korea, despite being run by one totalitarian family for the last seven decades, is not entirely monolithic. It does have its hawks and its doves, and analysts speculated that hard-liners in the military, concerned about the sudden talk of denuclearization, might be trying to interfere with the current diplomatic efforts.
At the same time as threatening to scupper the summit with Trump, North Korea did cancel talks with South Korean officials that had been scheduled for today, less than 24 hours after agreeing to them.
North Korea had said it would send five senior officials to Panmunjom for meetings with South Korean officials, the first such talks since the April 27 inter-Korean summit.
They were due to discuss some of the infrastructure aid that South Korea would provide to North Korea as part of their broader detente.