By KIM TONG-HYUNG, Related Press
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korean chief Kim Jong Un says he nonetheless has good reminiscences of U.S. President Donald Trump and urged Washington to drop its demand the North give up its nukes as a precondition for resuming long-stalled diplomacy.
Talking to Pyongyang’s rubber-stamp parliament on Sunday, Kim pressured that he has no intention of ever resuming dialogue with rival South Korea, a key U.S. ally that helped dealer Kim’s earlier summits with Trump throughout the American president’s first time period, in line with a speech printed by state media on Monday.
Kim suspended nearly all cooperation with the South following the collapse of his second summit with Trump in 2019 over disagreements about U.S.-led sanctions in opposition to the North. Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have worsened in recent times as Kim has accelerated his weapons buildup and aligned with Russia over the conflict in Ukraine.
Kim’s feedback got here as South Korean President Lee Jae Myung departed for New York to attend the U.N. Common Meeting, the place he’s anticipated to deal with nuclear tensions on the Korean Peninsula and name on North Korea to return to talks.
Trump can be anticipated to go to South Korea subsequent month to attend the Asia-Pacific Financial Cooperation summit, prompting media hypothesis that he could attempt to meet Kim on the inter-Korean border, as they did throughout their third assembly in 2019, which in the end did not salvage their nuclear diplomacy.
Throughout his newest speech on the Supreme Folks’s Meeting, Kim reiterated that he would by no means hand over his nuclear weapons program, which specialists say he sees as his strongest assure of survival and the extension of his household’s dynastic rule.
“The world already knows well what the United States does after forcing other countries to give up their nuclear weapons and disarm,” Kim mentioned. “We will never lay down our nuclear weapons … There will be no negotiations, now or ever, about trading anything with hostile countries in exchange for lifting sanctions.”
He mentioned he nonetheless holds “good personal memories” of Trump from their first conferences and that there’s “no reason not to” resume talks with the USA if Washington “abandons its delusional obsession with denuclearization.”
Kim has stepped up testing actions in recent times, demonstrating weapons of assorted ranges designed to strike U.S. allies in Asia and the U.S. mainland. Analysts say Kim’s nuclear push is geared toward ultimately pressuring Washington to just accept the thought of the North as a nuclear energy and to barter financial and safety concessions from a place of power.
Kim can be making an attempt to bolster his leverage by strengthening cooperation with conventional allies Russia and China, in an rising partnership geared toward undercutting U.S. affect.
He has despatched hundreds of troops and large provides of army tools to Russia to assist help President Vladimir Putin’s conflict in Ukraine. He visited Beijing earlier this month, sharing the highlight with Chinese language President Xi Jinping and Putin at an enormous army parade. Consultants say Kim’s uncommon international journey was probably supposed to spice up his leverage forward of a possible resumption of talks with the USA.
There’s rising concern in Seoul that it might lose its voice in future efforts to defuse the nuclear standoff on the peninsula, because the North seeks to barter instantly with the USA. Such fears have been amplified final 12 months when Kim declared that he was abandoning North Korea’s long-standing aim of peaceable unification with South Korea and ordered a rewriting of the North’s structure to cement the South as a everlasting enemy.
