North Korea threatening to call off talks over drills

Summit with South set for today was already canceled

WASHINGTON — North Korea threw President Donald Trump’s planned summit with its leader, Kim Jong Un, into doubt Tuesday, threatening to call off the landmark meeting to protest a joint military exercise of the United States and South Korea.

The warning, delivered early Wednesday in North Korea via its official government news agency, caught Trump administration officials off guard and set off an internal debate over whether Kim was merely posturing in advance of the meeting in Singapore next month or was erecting a serious new hurdle.

North Korea had previously signaled flexibility about the military exercises, appearing to remove a perennial obstacle to talks between North and

South Korea. But the North also cited its objections to the joint U.S.-South Korean air force drill in postponing a separate high-level meeting with South Korea that had been planned for Wednesday.

As the White House scrambled to assess the North Korean statement, the State Department said planning for the June 12 summit meeting remained on track, and pointed to Kim’s earlier acceptance of the exercises, which had been conveyed to the United States by South Korean officials.

The North Korean statement injected sudden tension and uncertainty into what had been months of warming relations on the Korean Peninsula, most notably the summit meeting between Kim and President Moon Jae-in of South Korea on April 27 and their declaration to pursue peace.

The confusion created by the statement also underscored the risks for Trump in meeting with the 34-year-old North Korean leader. And it served as a reminder that for all of Kim’s cameraready smiles and diplomatic gestures of recent months, North Korea remains an opaque, unpredictable country.

“The South Korean authorities and the United States launched a largescale joint air force drill against our Republic even before the ink on the historic inter-Korean declaration has dried,” the official Korean Central News Agency said. “There is a limit to our goodwill.”

“We will be closely watching the attitude of the United States and South Korean authorities,” the news agency added.

It declared that the drill, known as Max Thunder, was a “deliberate military provocation” that had violated the inter-Korean summit declaration. The United States and South Korea, the North’s statement said, had mobilized 100 aircraft in the exercise to “make a pre-emptive airstrike” and “win the air.”

Senior officials from the two Koreas had been scheduled to meet in the “truce village” of Panmunjom on their border Wednesday to discuss putting in place an agreement to improve ties and ease military tensions, building on the declaration signed by their leaders on April 27.

The Pentagon said Max Thunder was an annual exercise to maintain military readiness to defend South Korea. “The defensive nature of these combined exercises has been clear for many decades and has not changed,” said a Defense Department spokesman, Col. Rob Manning.

The State Department spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, said: “Kim Jong Un had said previously that he understands the need and the utility of the United States and the Republic of Korea continuing in its joint exercises. They are exercises that are legal. They’re planned well, well in advance.”

She also said the United States had received no notification of a change in plans for the summit meeting. “We will continue to go ahead and plan the meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong Un,” she said.