Trump seeks to mollify Kim about summit
WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump sought yesterday to placate North Korea’s leader, Kim Jongun, after Pyongyang threatened to scrap their planned summit, saying Kim’s security would be guaranteed in any deal and his country would not suffer the fate of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya unless a deal could not be reached.
In rambling remarks in the White House’s Oval Office, Trump said that as far as he knew, the meeting with Kim was still on track but that the North Korean leader was possibly being influenced by Beijing after two recent visits he made there.
Trump distanced himself from comments by his national security adviser, John Bolton, that North Korea angrily denounced when casting doubt on the summit, which is planned for June 12 in Singapore.
‘‘North Korea is actually talking to us about times and everything else as though nothing happened,’’ Trump told reporters at the start of a meeting with Nato Secretarygeneral Jens Stoltenberg.
Trump said he was not pursuing the ‘‘Libya model’’ in getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programme. Bolton has repeatedly suggested the Libya model of unilateral disarmament for North Korea, most recently on Sunday.
Gaddafi was deposed and killed after Libyans joined the 2011 Arab Spring protests, aided by Nato allies who had encouraged him to give up his banned weapons of mass destruction under a 2003 deal.
In a statement on Wednesday that threatened withdrawal from the summit, North Korea’s first viceminister of foreign affairs, Kim Kye Gwan, derided as ‘‘absurd’’ Bolton’s suggestion of a deal similar to that under which components of Libya’s nuclear programme were shipped to the United States.
‘‘[The] world knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq, which have met miserable fate,’’ he said in apparent reference to the demises of Gaddafi and Iraq’s former president, Saddam Hussein.
Trump said the deal he was looking at would give Kim, a hereditary ruler who presides over a state widely criticised for serious human rights abuses, ‘‘protections that will be very strong’’.
‘‘He would be there, he would be running his country, his country would be very rich,’’ Trump said.
‘‘The Libya model was a much different model. We decimated that country,’’ he said, adding that it would only come into play ‘‘most likely’’ if a deal could not be reached.
Trump stressed that North Korea would have to abandon its nuclear weapons.
‘‘We cannot let that country have nukes. We just can’t do it,’’ he said.
He told reporters that if the meeting with Kim happened, then ‘‘it happens’’, and if not, the United States would go on to the next step. He did not elaborate.