Trump calls off plan for N. Korea summit
President cites recent ‘open hostility’ but leaves door open.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday pulled out of a highly anticipated summit meeting with Kim Jong Un, accusing the North Koreans of bad faith and lamenting that “this missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.”
The president made his announcement in a remarkably personal, at times mournful-sounding letter to Kim, North Korea’s leader, in which he cited the North’s “tremendous anger and open hostility” in recent public statements as the specific reason for canceling the meeting.
Trump said later that the meeting, which had been scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, could still happen, and North Korea issued a strikingly conciliatory response, saying it hoped Trump would reconsider.
But Trump also renewed talk of military action against the North and vowed to keep press-
ing economic sanctions, guaranteeing that for now, at least, his unlikely courtship of Kim will give way to a more familiar cycle of threats and tension.
The mixed messages were in keeping with a diplomatic gambit that had an air of unreality from the start, when, in early March, Trump spontaneously accepted Kim’s invitation to meet — an acceptance that North Korea did not even publicly acknowledge for several days.
As the date for the meeting drew closer, U.S. and North Korean officials staked out deeply divergent positions on how quickly the North should surrender its nuclear arsenal. North Korean officials failed to show up for a planning meeting last week in Singapore, snubbing a White House advance team led by the deputy chief of staff, Joe Hagin.
The White House, which seemed ill-prepared for a long negotiation, began to have second thoughts. By Thursday, after a North Korean official labeled Vice President Mike Pence a “political dummy” and threatened a “nuclear-to-nuclear showdown,” there seemed little rationale for the encounter, beyond Trump’s desire to make history.
“I believe that this is a tremendous setback for North Korea and, indeed, for the world,” Trump said at a bill-signing ceremony. But he added, “If and when Kim Jong Un chooses to engage in constructive dialogue and actions, I am waiting.
“They want to do what’s right,” he said. “I really think that they want to do — and it was only recently that this has been taking place.”
North Korea appeared to reciprocate, declaring a willingness to give Trump the “time and opportunity” to reconsider.
“The unilateral cancellation of the summit was unexpected and very regrettable,” said Kim Kye Gwan, a vice foreign minister of North Korea. But he said the North remained “willing to sit down with the United States anytime, in any format, to resolve the problems.”
Hours before Trump’s announcement, North Korea had blown up an underground nuclear testing site before foreign journalists gathered to witness the demolition. It was the latest in a series of gestures by the North meant to smooth the way for a meeting.
While White House officials said a meeting with Kim was still a possibility, keeping the existing date was all but impossible, given that, one senior official said, “June 12 is in 10 minutes.”
For Trump, who never tires of extolling his deal-making skills, the abrupt cancellation of the meeting raises questions about how he handled the mercurial North Korean leader. It also creates thorny issues for the administration’s efforts to keep the pressure on the North.
South Korea, which was caught off guard by Trump’s decision, may opt to continue its own diplomacy with Kim, opening a rift with its ally. Trump did not warn South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, of his decision, even though the two leaders met in Washington on Tuesday.
But the process exposed differences in tone between Trump and the people working for him. While the president continued to speak of the possibility of a meeting, a senior official briefed reporters about the “trail of broken promises.”
Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, infuriated North Korean officials by proposing the voluntary disarmament of Libya in 2003 as a precedent for North Korea. Under that deal, Libya gave up its entire arsenal without receiving any incentives.
Then, Pence warned that Kim could meet the same fate as Libya’s leader, Moammar Gadhafi, if he did not make a deal with the United States. Libyan rebels, aided by a NATO bombing campaign, killed Gadhafi during the Arab Spring upheavals in 2011. That prompted a North Korean official to call him a “political dummy.”
“We will neither beg the U.S. for dialogue nor take the trouble to persuade them if they do not want to sit together with us,” said Choe Son Hui, a vice foreign minister. She asked whether “the U.S. will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown.”
At the time Trump accepted Kim’s invitation, several officials said they believed that there was less than a 50 percent chance that the meeting would actually happen.
But the president dispatched his new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to work out the logistics for a meeting, and he, too, expressed optimism about the encounter. In addition to blowing up the nuclear site, North Korea pledged to halt nuclear and missile tests, and it released three Korean-Americans imprisoned there — which Trump acknowledged was a “beautiful gesture.”
As recently as Wednesday, the president expressed enthusiasm about meeting Kim. He said he would be open to a phased denuclearization of North Korea, provided its nuclear program was rapidly shut down. That is a more flexible position than the Libya model sketched out by Bolton.
The cancellation creates a crisis for Moon of South Korea, who said it was “disconcerting and very regrettable.”
“The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and building a permanent peace on the peninsula is a task we cannot give up or delay,” he said in a meeting Thursday with his National Security Council, according to his office.