North Korea yesterday promised further negotiations with the US as both sides sought to hold open the door while staking out their positions after their Hanoi summit spectacularly failed to produce a nuclear deal.
The second meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump on Thursday broke up in disarray, with a signing ceremony cancelled and no joint communique issued.
Each sought to blame the other’s intransigence for the deadlock, with Trump saying that Pyongyang wanted all sanctions imposed on it over its banned weapons programs lifted.
Photo: AFP
However, at a rare late-night news conference, North Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs Ri Yong-ho said that the North had only wanted some of the measures eased and that its offer to close “all the nuclear production facilities” at its Yongbyon complex was the best it could ever offer.
Despite the deadlock, KCNA yesterday reported that the two leaders had had a “constructive and candid exchange.”
Relations between the two countries — on opposite sides of the Korean War, which has not officially ended — had been “characterized by mistrust and antagonism” for decades, it said, adding that there were “inevitable hardships and difficulties” on the way to forging a new relationship.
It described the Hanoi meeting as “successful” and said that Kim had promised Trump another encounter.
Similarly, Trump said before leaving the Vietnamese capital that he hoped to meet Kim again.
“Sometimes you have to walk and this was just one of those times,” an unusually downbeat Trump told reporters.
“I’d much rather do it right than do it fast,” he said, while reaffirming his “close relationship” with Kim. “There’s a warmth that we have and I hope that stays, I think it will.”
South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has brokered talks between the US and the North, sought to take the positives.
The talks had made “meaningful progress,” with Trump and Kim building “more trust” and “mutual understanding,” Moon said in a speech in Seoul.
The outcome in Hanoi fell far short of the expectations and hopes before the meeting, after critics said that the initial historic meeting in Singapore — which produced only a vague commitment from Kim to work “toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” — was more style over substance.
According to senior US officials, in the week leading up to the Hanoi summit, North Korea demanded the lifting of effectively all the economic sanctions imposed on Pyongyang by the UN Security Council since March 2016.
Before that date, the measures were largely focused on preventing technology transfers, but since then restrictions have been imposed on several valuable industries in an effort to force concessions from Pyongyang, including coal and iron ore exports, seafood and the textile trade.
“It was basically all the sanctions except for armaments,” a senior US official told reporters. “It tallies up to the tune of many, many billions of [US] dollars.”
In return, they North Korean negotiators were only offering to close “a portion of the Yongbyon complex,” a sprawling site covering multiple different facilities — and the North is believed to have other uranium enrichment plants.
Trump had urged Kim to go “all in” to secure a deal, the official said, adding that Washington was willing to do so.
“The weapons themselves need to be on the table,” he added, referring to Pyongyang’s existing stock of atomic bombs, as well as its intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can reach the whole of the US mainland.
However, the process is continuing and Washington is “encouraged by the opportunities ahead of us,” the official said. “There’s still ample opportunity to talk.”
Analysts said that the failure to reach a deal in Hanoi does not herald the end of negotiations.
“I don’t think it’s a disaster and it doesn’t end the dialogue process,” International Crisis Group senior adviser Chris Green said.
Trump could not afford to do “a quote-unquote ‘bad deal’” in Hanoi, Green said. “I think it benefits him to look tough, to string this out.”
However, others have pointed to a lack of preparation ahead of the meeting, with the two sides unable to bridge the gaps between them in time.
Former US ambassador to South Korea Kathleen Stephens said that the impasse “highlighted the importance of working-level talks.”
Kim put “more emphasis” on sanctions relief than most observers predicted, she said, and mutual liaison offices and an end-of-war statement had proved insufficient to persuade him to go further with denuclearization.
Joel Wit and Jenny Town of the respected Washington-based 38 North project said that while there had been fears beforehand that Trump “was going to give away the store, he did just the opposite, holding out for a better deal.”
“The two leaders are heavily invested in the process, so hopefully, this failed summit will just be one more chapter in the rollercoaster ride that is the Trump presidency,” they wrote.
However, if the North Korean process stalls and Trump’s domestic troubles mount, North Korea could slip down his priority list, Wit and Town added.
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