Relationship turns sour

At one point declaring that they had fallen ‘in love’

SEOUL, South Korea (AFP) — North Korea criticized Donald Trump in a stinging denunciation of the United States on Friday, 12 June, the second anniversary of a landmark summit in Singapore where the US president shook hands with leader Kim Jong-un.

It was the latest in a series of vitriolic statements from Pyongyang aimed at both Washington and Seoul, and came a day after the North implicitly threatened to disrupt November’s election if the US did not stay out of inter-Korean affairs.

In recent days, Pyongyang has excoriated the South over defectors launching leaflets criticizing Kim into the North and announced it was cutting all official communication links with Seoul.

Friday’s broadside contained some of the harshest criticism Pyongyang has sent Washington’s way in recent months, and casts doubt over the future of the two sides’ long-stalled nuclear talks process.

In the onslaught, the North’s foreign minister Ri Son-gwon accused Washington of hypocrisy and seeking regime change, saying that the hopes of 2018 had “faded away into a dark nightmare.”

Trump and Kim were all smiles in front of the world’s cameras in Singapore as a North Korean leader met a sitting US president for the first time, and afterwards Trump proclaimed on Twitter that “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”

But a second meeting in Hanoi last year to put meat on the bones of the North’s vaguely worded Singapore pledge to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean

Peninsula” collapsed over what Pyongyang would be willing to give up in exchange for sanctions relief. US diplomats insist that they believe Kim promised in Singapore to give up its arsenal, something Pyongyang has taken no steps to do. The North is under multiple international sanctions over its banned weapons program. It believes it deserves to be rewarded for its moratorium on nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests and the disabling of its atomic test site, along with the return of jailed US citizens and remains of soldiers killed in the Korean War. “Nothing is more hypocritical than an empty promise,” Ri said in his statement, carried by the official KCNA news agency. Trump has made much of his connection with Kim — at one point declaring that they had fallen “in love” through their exchanges of letters.

FANG DONGXU/CHINA DAILY A 5G-ENABLED Suning delivery vehicle is tested in a street in Nanjing, Jiangsu province.

SAUL LOEB/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Happier days In this file photo in 2018, US President Donald Trump gestures as he meets with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un at the start of their historic US-North Korea summit in Singapore. Two years after a landmark summit between North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump, any hopes for improved ties have turned to feelings of “despair,” Pyongyang’s foreign minister said.