US President Donald Trump assured that the June 12 summit between North Korea and the US would be held, The Hill reported on May 18.
During an Oval Office meeting with NATO’s secretary-general, Trump expressed his concerns over the alleged North Korean decision to reconsider the upcoming summit. The US President stressed that any official confirmation of this pulling out hadn’t been received.
“Nothing has changed on North Korea that we know of. We have not been told anything,” Trump said. “And if it does that’s fine and if it doesn’t I think we’ll probably have a very successful meeting.”
On May 16, North Korea threatened that it would call off the Pyongyang-Washington summit. Pyongyang was angered with remarks of US National Security Advisor John Bolton. He stated that Washington “is looking at the Libya model of 2003, 2004”, when Libya gave up its nuclear weapons program under the “international community” pressure and was later immersed into chaos by the US and its NATO allies intervened in Libya.
Trump stressed that “Libyan model isn’t a model that we have at all when we’re thinking of North Korea.”
The US president pointed out that he is “willing to do a lot” to offer North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un “protections” if he agrees to surrender his nuclear weapons.
“In Libya we decimated that country. That country was decimated. There was no deal to keep Gadhafi. The Libyan model that was mentioned was a much different deal,” Trump pointed out.
US President marked that the upcoming summit and further US-North Korean negotiations would allow Kim to continue “running his country” and make it “very rich.”
While North Korea demands that US guarantees the safety, Washington insists on a “complete,” “verifiable” and “irreversible” dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear program move them out of the country within six months, Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun reported citing sources aware of the situation.
On May 13, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CBS News that North Korea would receive sanctions relief, in a case of “total” and “complete” denuclearization.
“Our ask is complete and total denuclearization of North Korea,” Pompeo said. “And I said early this week I think in that sense Chairman Kim shares that same objective.”
According to a press release of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of North Korea posted on May 15, North Korea’s government took “technical measures for dismantling the northern nuclear test ground of the DPRK in order to ensure transparency of discontinuance of the nuclear test”. The ceremony will be held between May 23 and 25.
