Leader of SKorea asks North, US to bend

SEOUL, South Korea — The United States and North Korea must each give a little in order to facilitate face-to-face talks, South Korea’s president said Monday as he tried to keep the momentum going in the Olympics-inspired detente.

After talking with Ivanka Trump, the American president’s daughter and adviser, and separately with a senior North Korean official over the weekend, President Moon Jae-in hosted Chinese Vice Premier Liu Yandong in his office Monday.

“The United States needs to lower its bar for dialogue and North too must show its willingness to denuclearize,” Moon told Liu during their meeting, a spokesman for the South Korean president said. “It is important for enabling the U.S. and North Korea to sit down face to face.”

Time is short for the South Korean president, given that his military is due to start huge exercises with the United States on April 1, an event that elicits an angry response from North Korea every year. Plus, North Korea has a history of putting all inter-Koreanrelated issues on ice during the two months of drills.

But North Korea, while apparently open to the idea of talks, has not agreed that its nuclear weapons are up for negotiation.

Kim Yong Chol, the leader of a North Korean delegation now visiting Seoul and an official blacklisted by both the United States and South Korea for his role in the nuclear program, seemed to obfuscate on Monday.

While Kim reiterated his statement that North Korea is open to dialogue with the United States,he did not exactly welcome the idea of talking about denuclearization.

The White House issued a tempered reaction to the South Korean government’s report that North Korea was willing to talk, signaling that any talks must be about “complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization.”

“The maximum-pressure campaign must continue until North Korea denuclearizes,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.