North Korea Says it Wants Talks With the US

Earlier today, President Trump informed the North Koreans that in light of their hostility (that would be threatening nuclear war) that the planned summit in Singapore was off. Minutes ago, North Korea issued a statement:

BREAKING: North Korea said it is ready to talk to U.S. ‘at any time,’ responding to Trump’s cancellation of summit with Kim Jong-un.

After President Trump’s abrupt cancellation of the planned summit, North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan issued a conciliatory statement, saying the regime was ready to meet with the United States “at any time.”

Trump’s decision did not match with “the world’s desire,” Kim said in a statement published by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency Friday morning. A summit is urgently needed to deal with the “grave hostilities” in the relationship between North Korea and the United States, the statement said.

“Leader Kim Jong-un had focused every effort on his meeting with President Trump,” the vice foreign minister said.

What this shows is that Trump’s national security team has vision for what they want to accomplish. And unlike the arms control weenies who have been bleating about how Trump is messing stuff up–sorry, being a professor at a college in Vermont really doesn’t make you knowledgeable about much except whatever they do at colleges in Vermont–the Trump administration knows that politically they have to come away from this summit with something tangible.

They’ve just pulled the plug on the Iran deal and if they come up with some nebulous IAEA mediated monitoring system, they will be laughed at by the left and right. They also know that Kim needs this meeting more than Trump needs it. Trump is punching down by treating Kim as a peer when he definitely is not.

Being told to kiss off by Trump was a definite blow to his prestige. Plus, he’d given up prisoners and demolished his nuclear test facility (the usefulness of the facility is both speculative and irrelevant) to get the meeting so he lost face in the whole exchange.

I can’t see the June 12 date still happening but I can see it being rescheduled with Kim having a better understanding of what the US negotiating position is.

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