President Trump told the Gridiron Club on Saturday that he took a hard line with the North Koreans in a private diplomatic channel.
Trump was quoted as saying that North Korean officials had “called up” to initiate direct talks, but they met a stiff reply. “You have to denuke first,” Trump said, per the White House pool report.
Trump made the comment in the midst of a joking speech at the Club’s annual dinner, which features a series of roasts directed at and coming from the president. But the comment touched on a delicate issue: U.S. officials have tried to strike a balance between using sanctions to pressure North Korea into negotiations over the regime’s nuclear weapons program, while also maintaining, as a precondition, that those talks must end with the regime’s surrender of the offending weapons.
“We’re ready to talk anytime they’d like to talk, but they have to come to the table and they have to come to the table with a view that they do want to make a different choice,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in December.
“We’ve said from the diplomatic side we’re ready to talk anytime North Korea would like to talk, and we’re ready to have the first meeting without precondition,” he added. [C]an we at least sit down and see each other face to face? And then we can begin to lay out a map, a roadmap of what we might be willing to work towards. I don’t think – it’s not realistic to say we’re only going to talk if you come to the table ready to give up your program. They have too much invested in it. And the president is very realistic about that as well.”
It wasn’t clear to some attendees if Trump was making a joke. “I asked the NSA director whether this was true — that North Koreans had approached the US for talks,” NBC News’ Ken Dilanian tweeted. “He declined to comment.”
