RadioOnFire.com - Donald Trump hadn't said much about North Korea since returning from his trip to Singapore in early June and declaring that the threat posed by the country's nuclear-armed missiles had vanished. That all changed on Monday morning—with potentially deadly consequences.
"I have confidence that Kim Jong Un will honor the contract we signed &, even more importantly, our handshake," Trump noted. "We agreed to the denuclearization of North Korea," he added.
No doubt the president had seen coverage of the North Korean Foreign Ministry's July 7 statement on his secretary of state's trip to Pyongyang. Mike Pompeo walked away from Pyongyang with an empty hand and with little clarity on where the process that began on June 12 in Singapore is headed.
North Korea, meanwhile, chided the "regretful" U.S. attitude, criticizing Pompeo for having the gall to come to Pyongyang and continue to insist on North Korea's unilateral disarmament.
The Foreign Ministry took aim in particular at Pompeo's “gangster-like demands for denuclearization just calling for CVID, declaration, and verification, all of which run counter to the spirit of the Singapore summit meeting and talks.”
Pompeo's trip to Pyongyang laid bare the tension that many Korea-watchers and experts had promised would come since March 8—the day Trump accepted Kim's invitation to meet face-to-face. Trump thinks Kim is going to give up his nuclear weapons despite Kim having never said he would do so.
Take Trump's comment for instance that in Singapore, the two countries agreed to “the denuclearization of North Korea.” If that's the case, it wasn't reflected in the short document that Kim Jong Un signed on to, which was far from any sort of legally enforceable "contract." The Singapore declaration only promised that North Korea would “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
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