Negotiations to dismantle the North Korea nuclear weapons program have not broken down, according to a State Department official who disputed the regime’s negative assessment.
“The early comments from the DPRK delegation do not reflect the content or the spirit of today’s 8 1/2 hour discussion,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said, using the official acronym for the North Korean regime. “The United States and the DPRK will not overcome a legacy of 70 years of war and hostility on the Korean Peninsula through the course of a single Saturday.”
U.S. and North Korean officials assembled Saturday for a meeting that American officials hoped would jump- start a stalled effort to fill in the details of the joint declaration released after President Trump’s historic summit with dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore last year. But North Korean officials downplayed the value of the conversations.
“The negotiations have not fulfilled our expectation and finally broke off,” North Korea’s top nuclear envoy Kim Myong Gil told reporters. “It is entirely because the U.S. has not discarded its old stance and attitude that the negotiation this time failed to produce any results.”
Ortagus rejected that criticism.
“The U.S. brought creative ideas and had good discussions with its DPRK counterparts,” she said. “In the course of the discussions, the U.S. delegation reviewed events since the Singapore summit, and discussed the importance of more intensive engagement to solve the many issues of concern for both sides. The U.S. delegation previewed a number of new initiatives that would allow us to make progress in each of the four pillars of the Singapore joint statement.”
The contradictory tones perplexed an Asian diplomat who follows the issues.
“Maybe it reflects the wishful thinking from the U.S., but there is no reason for showing that kind of wishful thinking,” the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner. “The North Korean position is very different.”
The attempt to use economic sanctions to pressure Kim to surrender his nuclear weapons arsenal is one of the signature policy initiatives of the Trump administration, as the risk of conflict with the pariah state grew throughout 2017. Kim, who is on the cusp of demonstrating the ability to deliver nuclear weapons to the U.S., refused at his second summit with Trump to make substantive concessions unless the president lifted most of the sanctions on his regime. Trump refused, but he has continued to push for a deal.
“I think the strategic decision that Kim Jong Un is operating through is that he will do whatever he can to keep a deliverable nuclear weapons capability and to develop and enhance it further,” former White House national security advisor John Bolton, who left the administration in September, said last week. “So I think right now we are in a classic standoff with North Korea.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has met with Kim repeatedly and selected special envoy Steve Biegun as the point man for the negotiations, said earlier Saturday that he was “very hopeful” the two sides would make progress in Stockholm.
“We came with a set of ideas,” he said. “We hope that the North Koreans came with a good spirit and a willingness to try to move forward to implement what President Trump and Chairman Kim agreed to back in Singapore.”
Ortagus adopted a similar posture after the meeting, urging North Korea to match the United States’ willingness to make a breakthrough.
“At the conclusion of our discussions, the United States proposed to accept the invitation of our Swedish hosts to return to Stockholm to meet again in two weeks time, in order to continue discussions on all of the topic,” she said. “These are weighty issues, and they require a strong commitment by both countries. The United States has that commitment.”
North Korean officials have stymied major breakthroughs throughout the process.
“North Korea and U.S. have not agreed [on] even the basics, like the definition of denuclearization — that is the really important points,” the Asian diplomat said, adding that it is “not clear whether [North Korea] also accepted the invitation to continue negotiation.”
