Following the failure to reach an agreement at last month’s summit between the US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, tension has been building between the two sides, threatening the negotiations that they have built over the past year.
While the breakdown of their second meeting did not lead to a war of words, North Korea said it was considering suspending talks with the United States, while Washington accused Pyongyang of “not doing what it needs to do.”
The communist leader warned in his New Year’s speech this year he would have to find a new way for defending the North if the US did not keep its promises. As the US appears to have no intention of taking the “commensurate measures” the North seeks for the denuclearization steps it has taken, speculation has grown as to whether Kim will take this route.
North Korea’s Deputy Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui held a news conference in Pyongyang on Friday, in which she indicated that the country would not yield to the US demands put forward in the Hanoi summit. She added that Kim would soon make an announcement on his country’s direction, to decide on whether to resume missile launches.
“What is clear is that the US has thrown away a golden opportunity,” she said.
Trump and Kim sat down for a two-day summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, from Feb. 27 to 28 to strike an accord on denuclearization. But the talks ended without an agreement, as the two sides failed to narrow their differences over what each side was willing to give.
While Washington demanded North Korea dismantle of all of its nuclear weapons program first, Pyongyang insisted on the lifting of economic sanctions in its “entirety,” while taking incremental steps for denuclearization.
Choe blamed the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton for the summit’s failure, saying they “created an atmosphere of hostility and mistrust,” according to the Russian news agency TASS.
However, the senior diplomat highlighted that the chemistry of Trump-Kim relationship was “mysteriously wonderful.”