Trump seeks to placate Kim over June summit
SAYS HE WAS NOT PURSUING THE ‘LIBYA MODEL’ WITH NORTH KOREA
US President Donald Trump sought on Thursday to placate North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un after Pyongyang threatened to scrap an unprecedented 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 that could not be reached.
In rambling remarks in the White House’s Oval Office in which he also sharply criticised China over trade, 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 casting doubt on the summit, which is planned for June 12 in Singapore.
‘North still in talks’
“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 Secretary General 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 vice-minister 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 Hussain.
Trump said the deal he was looking at would give Kim “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 with North Korea.
‘Must abandon nukes’
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 of North Korea, which has been working on missiles capable of hitting the United States.
The United States has demanded the “complete, verifiable, and irreversible” dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme.
Meanwhile, North Korea has declined to accept a list of South Korean journalists hoping to observe the closure of its nuclear test site, South Korea said yesterday, raising new questions about the North’s commitment to reducing tension.