US-N Korea talks in jeopardy
TRUMP’S NEW NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR IS ADVOCATE OF MILITARY FORCE John Bolton was previously rejected as a negotiating partner by Pyongyang.
Once rejected by North Korea as “human scum”, US President Donald Trump’s latest pick for national security advisor has called for regime change in North Korea, prompting worries in Asia ahead of a historic summit between Washington and Pyongyang.
Trump announced in a tweet he was replacing HR McMaster with John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the United Nations who has advocated the use of military force against North Korea and Iran and has previously been rejected as a negotiating partner by Pyongyang.
“This is worrisome news,” said Kim Hack-yong, head of the national defence committee of South Korea’s parliament. “North Korea and the US need to have dialogue but this only fuels worries over whether the talks will ever happen.”
At Seoul’s presidential Blue House, which has been forced to navigate between the unpredictable personalities of leaders in both Pyongyang and Washington, officials were circumspect.
“If a new road opens, we have to go that path,” a senior Blue House official said. “Bolton has much knowledge on the issues regarding the Korean peninsula and most of all, we know him to be one of the US president’s aides who is trusted.”
He said Chung Eui-yong, the South’s national security office head, had not yet spoken with Bolton.
Bolton has described Trump’s plan to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as an opportunity to deliver a threat of military action.
“This could well be a fairly brief session where Trump says: ‘Tell me you have begun total denuclearisation, because we’re not going to have protracted negotiations. You can tell me right now or we’ll start thinking of something else,’” he told a Washington radio station. Former South Korean intelligence official Nam Sung-wook said Trump may not even get the opportunity to deliver that message. “Bolton being tapped for this position makes for a very difficult situation where the US-North Korea summit may not even happen,” he said.
The meeting is supposed to happen by the end of May, but a time and place have yet to be settled on.
Pyongyang had no comment about Bolton, whose criticism of then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and Pyongyang’s human rights record in 2003 spurred state media to call him “human scum and bloodsucker”. North Korean officials would not recognise him as a US government representative or talk with him because of his “political vulgarity and psychopathological condition”, state media said at the time.