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Pence angers North Korea, cooling plans for U.S. talks
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea said Thursday that it would have second thoughts about a summit meeting between its leader, Kim Jong Un, and President Donald Trump if American officials continued to make what the North considers threats against its leadership.
Gadhafi gave up his nascent nuclear program in the apparent hopes of staving off Western intervention and sanctions, and of negotiating economic integration with the West. But little of that happened, and years later he was killed by rebels after he was weakened in a military action against Libya by the United States and its European allies.
In a statement carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency on Thursday, the North Korean official, Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui, referred to “unlawful and outrageous acts” by top American officials and said Pence had made “unbridled and impudent remarks that North Korea might end like Libya.”
Choe’s comment was the second time in a week that North Korea has threatened to withdraw from Kim’s planned summit with Trump, which is slated for June 12 in Singapore.
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“As a person involved in the U.S. affairs, I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks gushing out from the mouth of the U.S. vice president,” Choe said. “In case the U.S. offends against our goodwill and clings to unlawful and outrageous acts, I will put forward a suggestion to our supreme leadership for reconsidering the DPRK-U.S. summit.”
DPRK is the abbreviation of the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
North Korea threw the meeting into doubt last week when Kim Kye Gwan, another vice foreign minister of North Korea, warned that his country could call off the landmark encounter if the United States insisted on “unilateral” abandonment of its nuclear program. The official rejected the Trump administration’s demand that it quickly dismantle its nuclear program as Libya did 15 years ago, singling out John R. Bolton, Trump’s new national security adviser, for condemnation.
“If the United States is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but reconsider our proceeding to the North Korea-U. S. summit,” Vice Minister Kim said at the time.
Bolton has repeatedly referred to the Libyan model. Trump last week disavowed Bolton’s remarks, but never referred to Libya’s voluntary disarmament in 2003. Instead, he discussed Gadhafi's demise at the hands of his own people less than a decade later in the upheavals that swept the Arab world, and suggested that if there was ultimately no agreement over the North’s nuclear program, its leaders could meet a similar fate.
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Trump also opened the door on Tuesday to a phased dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, backing away from his previous demand that Kim completely abandon his arsenal without any reciprocal American concessions.
In her statement Thursday, Choe accused Pence, another North Korea hard-liner in the Trump administration, of promoting a “military option” on North Korea and also pushing for a quick and unilateral nuclear disarmament of the country.
In his interview Monday, Pence said, “You know, as the president made clear, this will only end like the Libyan model ended if Kim Jong Un doesn’t make a deal.”
When it was noted that the comparison could be interpreted as a threat, Pence replied, “Well, I think it’s more of a fact.”
Speaking on “Fox and Friends” on Wednesday, Trump said of the prospect of a meeting: “We have certain conditions. We’ll see what happens. But there’s a good chance. I mean, it’d be a great thing for North Korea. If that happens, it would be a great thing for North Korea. Listen, it would be a great thing for the world, so we’ll see what happens.”
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A White House spokesman declined to immediately comment on the latest remarks from Pyongyang.
In her statement Thursday, Choe said, “Whether the U.S. will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behavior of the United States.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
CHOE SANG-HUN © 2018 The New York Times
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