The US President called the summit with North Korea’s leader ‘a very substantial chance’ but didn’t exclude that the historic meeting with Kim Jong-un next month may not happen, Financial Times reported on Wednesday.
Donald Trump welcomed South Korean president Moon Jae-in in the Oval Office, following their meeting, the American leader suggested that the June 12 summit, which is due to take place in Singapore, could be delayed. “It may not work out for June 12,” wrote Trump on his Twitter and added,
“If it doesn’t happen, maybe it will happen later… There are certain conditions that we want and I think we’ll get those conditions and if we don’t, we don’t have the meeting,”
POTUS concluded.
The build-up to the summit has been shaped by an unusual degree of public showmanship by both leaders, a diplomatic version of their hostile exchanges last year. But while the threats and insults worked at the rhetorical level, this is about substantive issues where the detail matters.
Trump about the summit with Kim
Mr Trump did not say what conditions the US had set for the summit but, asked by a reporter about the North’s arsenal, he said that denuclearisation ‘must take place’. For Trump’s diplomatic corps, cancelling off the summit will be the biggest failure. Meanwhile, Donald Trump said:
“North Korea has a chance to be a great country and I think they should seize the opportunity.”
Trump’s Oval Office remarks were the strongest sign from him yet about the possibility of a delay or cancellation of what would be the first-ever summit between the leaders of the United States and North Korea.
Pyongyang has been particularly irritated by the proposal made by Mr Bolton that North Korea should adopt the “ Libya model ” for denuclearisation — a reference to the late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s 2003 decision to scrap his country’s fledgeling nuclear programme.
