WASHINGTON, D.C. (CNN) – A huge question mark hangs over a possible summit between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump.
North Korea is threatening to pull out of planned talks if Washington insists on “pushing it into a corner” to get rid of its nuclear arsenal.
The North has also suspended talks with Seoul, angry over a military drill between South Korea and the U.S. South Korea says the North’s decision is regrettable.
After months of warming relations and so-called goodwill gestures, we’re seeing a different tack from North Korea. This Wednesday we have two articles from the state-run media KCNA one of them from the vice minister of the Foreign Affairs Department, saying that if the United States tries to push North Korea into a corner and tries to force it to have unilateral nuclear disarmament then they are not interested in the talks. They’ll have to reflect on whether or not they have this historic summit between Kim Jong-un and the U.S. president Donald Trump. Now, this is really the first time that North Korea has threatened to potentially pull out of this summit with Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump himself has also threatened this over recent weeks saying that if it didn’t appear that these talks would be fruitful he either wouldn’t go or would walk out during the talks themselves. So clearly this is a very different approach. We are seeing from North Korea at this point also slamming what we’ve heard from the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the National Security Adviser John Bolton in Sunday talk shows they were discussing about how if North Korea opened up then they would be helped economically. Mike Pompeo saying it wouldn’t be with the U.S. tax-payers money but certainly private enterprise could enter North Korea and help. Now that has been slammed by Pyongyang as well saying that that is not the way that they intend to grow their economy. So certainly we’re seeing a more combative approach from Pyongyang at this point. Some suggesting it could be some kind of a negotiation before the summit happens.
Could it be a power play or could it be North Korea is or is not happy with what they see as a U.S. claim of success because of their pressure and sanctions, which Pyongyang rejects? And also there was supposed to be high-level talks between North and South Korea this Wednesday. Those were canceled at the last minute by North Korea. They say that they were angered by the max thunder air force drills between the U.S. and South Korea and that potentially they hadn’t known about these before they actually took place. They usually are warned about them but they were saying that this was against the Panmunjom declaration. This agreement signed between the leaders of North and South Korea where they agreed that there wouldn’t be hostilities between the two sides. Now the blue has said that they saw that cancellation of the meeting as regrettable, saying it’s really not in the spirit of the Panmunjom declaration.
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