What happened to the US-North Korea talks?
Credit to Author: Tempo Desk| Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2019 16:15:59 +0000
WE had such great hopes for an end to the mutual threats of nuclear destruction by the United States and North Korea, after their leaders appeared to be making big progress in their peace talks. They seemed ready to sign an agreement in a summit meeting they held in Hanoi, Vietnam, last January 8, 2019. But US President Donald Trump unexpectedly left it, saying he could not accept Kim’s demand to lift all economic sanctions before committing to a specific denuclearization plan.
Now it looks like it’s back to square one. After hearing nothing substantial from Trump for months, North Korea has resumed its testing of missiles at a satellite launch site it had promised to close down.
Trump responded last Sunday with a statement on Tweeter that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un risks losing “everything” if he resumes hostility. He reminded the North Korean leader that he had signed “a strong denuclearization agreement” when they met in their first summit in Singapore on June 12, 2018. It was actually a joint statement that the two leaders signed calling for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.
Nothing came out of that first meeting in Singapore in 2018. The next time they met – in Hanoi, Vietnam, last January 8, 2019 – Trump abruptly left without signing any agreement. And there has been no further movement in the talks since then.
Last Monday, a senior North Korean official, former nuclear negotiator Kim Yong Chol, said his country would not yield to US pressure as it has nothing to lose. “Trump has so many things that he doesn’t know about (North Korea). We have nothing more to lose,” he said. “Though the US may take away anything more from us, it can never remove the strong sense of self-respect, might, and resentment against the US from us.”
It looks like the two nations are back to their old war of words. We just hope it will not degenerate further to the original state of nuclear confrontation, when North Korea was
http://tempo.com.ph/feed/