North Korea ‘Does Not Care’ What President Trump Has To Say About Prospects for Another Meeting

Don’t rule out another summit between President Trump and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, if Trump returns to the White House. That’s the message of a carefully worded North Korean commentary proclaiming officially, definitively, that North Korea simply “does not care” about whatever Trump has to say about the prospects for a fourth meeting with Mr. Kim. Far from engaging in the usual nasty rhetoric reserved for commentaries about its enemies, this one remarked, in almost a reasonable, conciliatory tone, “It is true that Trump, when he was president, tried to reflect the special personal relations between the heads of states in the relations between states.”The problem, the unsigned commentary quickly added, was that Trump “did not bring about any substantial positive change.” That was North Korea’s almost polite, restrained way of acknowledging Trump’s remarks, in his acceptance speech at the Republican Party nominating convention in Milwaukee, that he “got along very well” with Mr. Kim in their three meetings, first in Singapore in June 2018, then at Hanoi in February 2019 and finally at Panmunjom on the North-South Korean line in June 2019. Trump remarked, off-handedly but seriously, that he would “get along with him” when he’s back in the White House. “He’d like to see me back too,” he added, smiling. “I think he misses me.” Far from deriding or belittling that remark, the North Korean commentary, which had to have been written with the full authority of Mr. Kim, almost lamented the ultimate failure of those meetings while raising a glimmer of hope for the future.Sure, said North Korea’s state press agency, KCNA, “the international community” has concluded that America “is a perfidious country which does not fulfill its promises” — not exactly kind words but a lot lower key than some of the insults and invective the North has hurled at America. Almost sadly, the commentary added, the DPRK, for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, “has keenly and fully felt what the dialogue brought to it and what it lost.”Regardless of who wins, said KCNA, if “the political climate, confused by the infighting of the two parties, does not change. we do not care about this.”South Korea, just as officially and anonymously, saw the KCNA commentary as acknowledging “the friendship” that Trump and Mr. Kim formed in their three meetings even if the North would not agree to give up its nuclear program, as Washington has been demanding for years.The commentary, said the official, according to the South’s Yonhap News, suggests “that the future of U.S.-North Korea relations depends entirely on U.S. actions.”Certainly that was the implication of what appeared as almost a warning but less than a threat from North Korea. “The U.S. had better make a proper choice in the matter of how to deal with the DPRK in the future,” said the commentary, “while sincerely agonizing the gains and losses in the DPRK-U.S. confrontation,”There’s no doubt that Trump and Mr. Kim, not only in their personal meetings but in letters exchanged between them, kindled a special relationship in which Trump has said the two “fell in love.”A former national security adviser in Trump’s presidency, H. R. McMaster anticipated that if Trump is elected, “what you’re going to see right away is Kim Jong-un trying to rekindle their bromance.”Yonhap reported Mr. McMaster, at the Hudson Institute in Washington, as predicting that Mr. Kim would offer a deal in which American forces withdrew from the South while the North limited its nuclear program and halted its long-range missile program. Under the deal, he said, the North would keep “just a few nukes” — still not exactly what Washington is likely to want to accept.

North Korea ‘Does Not Care’ What President Trump Has To Say About Prospects for Another Meeting

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