Donald Trump met Kim Jong Un in the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas in June 2019.
Seoul:
North Korea says maintaining personal relationship between leader Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump is pointless if Washington sticks to hostile policies, state media reported Friday – two years after the first leaders’ summit.
US policies show that Washington remains a long-term threat to the North Korean state and its people, and North Korea will develop more reliable military forces to counter this threat, said Foreign Minister Ri Son Gwon in a press release published by the state press agency KCNA.
Trump and Kim exchanged insults and threats in 2017 as North Korea made significant progress in its nuclear and missile program, and the United States responded with an international effort to tighten sanctions.
Relations improved considerably around the Singapore summit in June 2018, the first time a serving US president met a North Korean leader, but the statement that emerged from the meeting was unclear.
Second summit in February 2019 in Vietnam failed to reach agreement due to conflicts over US calls to North Korea to give up nuclear weapons altogether and North Korean demands for alleviation quickly sanctions.
Ri said retrospectively that the Trump administration seemed to focus only on scoring political points while seeking to isolate and suffocate North Korea, and threaten it with preemptive nuclear strikes and regime change.
“We will never again give the US chief executive officer another package to use for realizations without receiving any feedback,” he said. “Nothing is more hypocritical than an empty promise.”
The United States Department of State and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
State Department spokesman Thursday told South Korean news agency Yonhap that the United States remains committed to engaging with North Korea and is open to a “flexible approach to reaching an agreement balanced”.
Electoral pressure
North Korea criticized the United States for commenting on inter-Korean affairs on Thursday and said Washington should remain calm if it wants the next presidential election to run smoothly.
North Korea is likely to try to increase pressure on the United States before the next election, said Daniel Russel, America’s largest diplomat for East Asia until the start of the administration Trump.
“Trump’s claim to have” solved “the North Korean problem gives them leverage,” he said.
Ramon Pacheco Pardo, a Korean expert at King’s College London, said that Ri’s statement shows that North Korea still sees all options on the table, from an appropriate diplomatic process to the further development of its nuclear program .
“North Korea continues to need an agreement more than the United States,” Pacheco Pardo said on Twitter. “It hasn’t changed.”
Ri said North Korea’s desire to open a new cooperative era is as deep as ever, but the situation on the Korean peninsula is getting worse every day.
“The United States claims to be an advocate for improving relations with the DPRK, but in fact it is determined to exacerbate the situation,” said Ri.
The official name of North Korea is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
(Reporting by Sangmi Cha and Josh Smith; Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom in Washington; Editing by David Gregorio, Cynthia Osterman and Lincoln Feast.)
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
