President Donald Trump told reporters on Thursday he would be willing to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to resume denuclearization talks at some point later this year, Reuters reported.
Trump’s comments as he left the White House followed after North Korea said on Monday it was willing to restart talks with the U.S. later this month.
Policy analysts say Trump’s removal of John Bolton, his national security adviser, earlier this week could help U.S. efforts to revive the talks but will not make Washington’s aim of persuading Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons any easier.
Having ousted Bolton from the White House, Trump delivered a kick to his former national security adviser to illustrate just how far he had fallen. Kim, the President said, “wanted nothing to do with” him during diplomatic talks over the past 17 months,” Washington Post reported.
“I don’t blame Kim Jong-un,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.
Trump’s remarks on Wednesday revealed lingering resentment that, in his view, Bolton had threatened to derail the United States’ historic first summit with Kim last year by taking an unnecessarily provocative position in suggesting that Pyongyang must follow the “Libya model” and relinquish all of its nuclear weapons under any prospective deal.
Trump’s willingness to publicly side with Kim over a recently departed senior aide marked the latest in a string of extraordinary episodes in which he has aligned himself with one of the world’s most brutal dictators against individual Americans, the intelligence community, the military and U.S. allies, the Post noted.
Be the first to comment