Photo courtesy of Sky News.
Summary: President Donald Trump canceled the summit with North Korea that was scheduled for June.
President Donald Trump called off the highly anticipated meeting between him and the leader from North Korea, but North Korea said they are still ready to meet “any time,” according to the Washington Post.
“Leader Kim Jong Un had focused every effort on his meeting with President Trump,” vice foreign minister Kim Gye Gwan said.
The summit had been scheduled to occur in June, but it was abruptly canceled by Trump, who announced the cancellation on Thursday. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the fragile relationship between North Korea and the US.
Trump wrote a letter to North Korea’s leader, Kim Jung Un, and he said that Kim’s recent behavior was the reason for the cancellation, according to NPR.
“Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long planned meeting,” Trump wrote in a letter to Kim.
The hostility Trump is referring to is the remarks North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui made on the country’s news service in which she said that the Asian country would make Washington “taste an appalling tragedy. Choe also criticized Vice President Mike Pence and called him a “dummy” for saying that North Korea could end up like Libya if it did not bring anything to the bargaining table.
Libya voluntarily got rid of its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and years later, its leader Moammar Gadhafi was killed by rebel forces.
“As a person involved in the U.S. affairs, I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks gushing out from the mouth of the U.S. vice president,” Choe said.
In Trump’s letter, the US president told Kim that the US was willing to talk again in the future.
“The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth,” Trump wrote. “If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write.”
The US currently has sanctions placed against North Korea, and Trump told Kim that the US was prepared to fight if North Korea were to ever attack as threatened.
In response to the cancellation, South Korea held an emergency meeting to discuss the news.
“We are attempting to make sense of what, precisely, President Trump means,” said government spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom.
North Korea expert Joel Wit of the Stimson Center told NPR that he felt the summit had been botched by the US. North Korea and the US had been doing well over the past few months but only recently did their relationship seem to sour.
“I think it failed in the large part because the administration has no idea how to deal with the North Koreans. It failed because the administration veered from, you know, praise of Kim Jong Un, to making threats, to talking about the Libya model, which is really something the North Koreans don’t want to hear about. It’s been entirely too public in this process while we should have been focused on quiet preparations,” Wit said.