President Obama on Friday opened the door to working directly with North Korea during a joint appearance with South Korean President Park Geun-hye on Friday.
Obama said he and Park reaffirmed in their meeting today that “our nations will never accept North Korea as a nuclear-weapons state,” but then said he is willing to work with North Korea.
“As my administration has shown with Iran and with Cuba, we are also prepared to engage nations with which we have had troubled histories,” he said. “But Pyongyang needs to understand it will not achieve the economic development it seeks so long as it clings to nuclear weapons.”
If a time came “where Pyongyang says, ‘we’re interested in seeing relief from sanctions and improved relations, and we are prepared to have a serious conversation about denuclearization,’ I think it’s fair to say we’ll be right there at the table,” Obama said.
“Now, whether, even if they made that gesture, they would then be willing to subject themselves to the kind of rigorous verification regimes that we have set up with Iran, particularly given their past violations of agreements, that’s a separate question,” he said. “But we haven’t even gotten to that point yet, because there’s been no indication on the part of the North Koreans, as there was with the Iranians, that they could foresee a future in which they did not possess or were not pursuing nuclear weapons.”
Obama also told the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea that its effort to become a nuclear state has “achieved nothing except to deepen North Korea’s isolation.”
