Trump Aide Insists North Korea Must Give Up Its Nukes as Kim Amps Up Rhetoric, Orders More Missile Tests

President Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un appear on a collision course that looks like the opposite of the flattery they bestowed on one another before their first meeting, in Singapore in June 2018. Even though Mr. Trump says he is happy to meet Mr. Kim, he’s sticking to the long-held American policy of demanding North Korea’s “complete denuclearization.”Having ruffled feathers in South Korea by casually referring to Mr. Kim’s country as a “nuclear power,” Mr. Trump dialed back through a carefully worded comment from the National Security Council. The White House came out with what amounted to a clarification for the benefit of nervous officials at Seoul.That was after Mr. Kim inspected what North Korea said was its “nuclear material production base” — probably the North’s main nuclear complex at Yongbyon. It is “indispensable for the country to steadily strengthen the nuclear shield … and develop the state’s nuclear counteraction posture indefinitely,” Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency quoted him as saying.Certainly Mr. Trump had a “good relationship” with Mr. Kim, the NSC spokesman, Brian Hughes, told South Korea’s Yonhap News, but he “will pursue the complete denuclearization of North Korea, just as he did in his first term.”That doesn’t mean Messrs. Trump and Kim will never meet again. They could conceivably discuss a range of other topics, including general peace on the Korean peninsula, while leaving the nuclear issue for later. Regardless, another summit won’t be easy — and could be completely unproductive. It was, after all, Mr. Kim’s “mix of toughness and diplomacy,” Mr. Hughes said, that “led to the first-ever leader-level commitment to complete denuclearization” — a reference to the brief joint statement they signed in Singapore after their first summit. Left unmentioned was that their second summit, at Hanoi in February 2019, broke up when Mr. Kim refused to give up his nuclear program and Mr. Trump humiliated him by halting the meeting, leaving a sumptuous luncheon untouched at Hanoi’s Metropole Hotel.Adding substance to the rhetoric, Mr. Kim earlier this week ordered the North’s first missile shots of Mr. Trump’s second presidency — the test-firing of what the South Korean command said were multiple sea-to-surface cruise missiles. KCNA said Mr. Kim personally oversaw the missile shots, proclaiming that the country’s “war deterrence” was “being perfected more thoroughly.”The presence of Mr. Kim at the launch site verified the missiles were from land, not from ships. Nonetheless, KCNA, by describing the missiles as “sea to surface,” indicated they were the type that could be fired from submarines. The shots, if carried out as claimed, were intended to show the North’s ability to fire missiles with nuclear warheads from vessels close to shore.North Korea piled on the rhetoric after Americans and South Koreans conducted a joint air exercise despite the political chaos that sees South Korea’s impeached president, Yoon Suk-yeol, in jail at Seoul waiting for the constitutional court to decide whether to approve his impeachment by the national assembly for his abortive attempt at imposing martial law, An advocate of American-Korean war games since his inauguration as president in May 2022, Mr. Yoon apparently authorized the exercise before the assembly — dominated by the leftist Democratic, or Minju, party — voted last month to impeach him, stripping him of authority as president even though he still held the title.North Korea’s foreign ministry called the military exercise, in which it said Japanese planes also participated, “a grave challenge to peace and stability on the Korean peninsula and the region.” America and South Korea, it said, were “staging various war drills targeting the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) almost every day.”Although Mr. Kim is not about to get rid of his nukes, he has to balance toughness on that topic with the need to wage what is turning into a disastrous struggle in Ukraine. North Korean troops are reportedly pulling back from the front while reinforcements from the North’s reservoir of 1.2 million troops are about to join them.A website that tracks North Korea from Seoul, NK News, quotes Ukrainian sources as saying “North Korean troops fighting against Ukraine are undergoing ‘error correction’ training with Russian commanders after suffering heavy losses.” They are, however, “expected to continue fighting in Kursk” — on the Russian side of the Ukraine border — amid “temporary retreat from front lines.”Mr. Kim’s agreement with President Putin to fight on behalf of Russia in the war against Ukraine may be earning a bonanza in Russian technology for the North’s program to fabricate nukes and long-range missiles, but the question is whether mounting casualties are too high a price to pay for such cooperation.Mr. Kim, at party meetings, is not reported to be commenting on either Ukraine or Mr. Trump and relations with America. North Korea, the foreign ministry said, “should counter the U.S. with the toughest counteraction from A to Z” — a challenge that shows the hazards of arranging another summit that may get nowhere.

Trump Aide Insists North Korea Must Give Up Its Nukes as Kim Amps Up Rhetoric, Orders More Missile Tests

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