North Korea, Kim Jong one, said there was no reason to avoid talks with the United States if Washington ceased to insist that his country abandoned nuclear weapons, but that it would never give up nuclear arsenal to end the sanctions, state media reported on Monday.
“Personally, I still have good memories of the American president (Donald) Trump,” the North Korean chief reported on Sunday in the assembly of the Supreme People on Sunday. The two leaders met three times during Trump’s first presidency.
Kim’s comments came while the new liberal government in Seoul urges Trump to take the lead in reopening dialogue with Kim, six years after all the peace talks with Pyongyang have collapsed for sanctions and nuclear dismantling.
“If the United States drops the absurd obsession to denucleize us and accept reality, and wants a real peaceful coexistence, there is no reason why we do not sit with the United States,” said Kim.
This is the first time that Kim has mentioned Trump by name since the American president inauguration in January, said Rachel Minyoung Lee, an expert in North Korea in the American Stimson Center.
“It’s an opening,” she said. “It is Kim’s invitation to Trump to rethink American policy on denuclearization, the involvement being that if the United States drops denuclearization, it could sit face to face with Trump.”
Read: XI says that Kim’s importance in North Korea for China “will not change”
Kim’s warm lyrics towards Trump were a contrast to his strident statement that he will never give up nuclear weapons or will not engage in dialogue with South Korea, which he has appointed a main enemy.
It was a question of survival for North Korea to build nuclear weapons to protect its security against serious threats from the United States and South Korea, said Kim, listing a series of regular military exercises by the allies who, according to him, had evolved into nuclear war exercises.
South Korean president Lee Jae Myung said in an interview with Reuters that North Korea built 15 to 20 nuclear bombs per year and that any agreement that frozen that manufacturing would be a useful step towards dismantling the program.
“Based on this, we can make negotiations in the medium term for reductions in nuclear weapons, and in the long term, once mutual trust is restored and the concerns of the Northern security regime are reduced, we can continue denuclearization,” he said.
Kim struck any progressive level thoroughly, saying that the recent openings of Washington and Seoul for dialogue were fallacious because their fundamental intention to weaken the North and to destroy his regime has remained unchanged, and that Lee’s progressive plan was proof.
“The world already knows very well what the United States does after having forced a country to abandon its nuclear weapons and its disarmaments,” said Kim. “We will never give up our nuclear weapons.”
Find out more: Trump wants to meet Kim in North Korea
“Conditions of dialogue”
Kim said the sanctions had been “learning experience” and made his country stronger and more resilient.
North Korea has been under United Nations sanctions and arms embargoes since its first nuclear test in 2006. But while sanctions supported funding for military development, Pyongyang continued to make progress in the construction of powerful nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
“The reality is that the previous approach of sanctions and pressure has not resolved the problem; it has aggravated it,” Lee told South Korea in Reuters.
Lee had urged Trump to try to meet Kim when the American president visits South Korea next month for a summit in Asia-Pacific, but the Lee of the Stimson Center said that Kim’s remarks seemed to block the involvement of the South.
“Perhaps he wants to get ahead of the Lee government and dissuade the Trump administration from cooperating with South Korea by reiterating that South Korea is a separate country and, therefore, cannot be a party to the North Korean nuclear problem,” she said.
The South Korean president said Pyongyang refused to speak to the south and that he did not believe that North Korea and the United States had concrete discussions, but he thought that the progressive approach remained the realistic option.
“Our main task is now to create the conditions for dialogue,” said Lee.
