The White House national security adviser has accused Pyongyang of not adhering to the deal reached by Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un in June, in the latest sign that the US president was premature in saying North Korea no longer posed a nuclear threat.
John Bolton, on Tuesday, said North Korea was to blame for the lack of progress towards denuclearisation since the leaders met. His comments came just two weeks after Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, rejected suggestions that Mr Kim had hoodwinked Mr Trump in Singapore.
“The United States has lived up to the Singapore declaration. It is just North Korea that has not taken the steps that we feel are necessary to denuclearise,” Mr Bolton told Fox & Friends, a US television programme. “What we really need is not more rhetoric, but performance from North Korea on denuclearisation.”
Mr Trump on Tuesday evening, defended his approach to North Korea. Speaking before a dinner with business leaders at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Mr Trump said his team was “doing well” and suggested that his critics should be patient.
“They’ve been working on this thing for 40 years. I left three months ago,” Mr Trump said, in an apparent reference to the landmark summit in Singapore with Mr Kim.
Mr Trump repeated his line that North Korea had not tested a missile or nuclear weapons for some time. “We have a good relationship with North Korea. So, we’ll see how it works,” the US president said. “I have a feeling that China now is not happy, and maybe they’re doing a little bit of a number, but we’ll figure that out.”
The comments from Mr Bolton, a long-time hawk who has previously called for US military action on North Korea, underscored the view of many critics that Pyongyang has no intention of abandoning its nuclear and missile programmes.
Mr Bolton was asked about the talks with Pyongyang after the regime slammed the approach being taken by Mr Pompeo, who briefly met his North Korean counterpart Ri Yong Ho at a regional forum in Singapore last week. At the Association of Southeast Asian Nations event, he urged other countries to maintain pressure on North Korea.
Mr Bolton told Fox television that the US would not lift sanctions until North Korea had abandoned its nuclear programme. “The idea that we’re going to relax the sanctions just on North Korea’s say-so is something that isn’t under consideration. We’re going to continue to apply maximum pressure to North Korea until they denuclearise.”
He added that Mr Pompeo had presented the North Korean foreign minister with a letter from Mr Trump addressed to Mr Kim. He said that in the letter, the US president had offered to send Mr Pompeo to Pyongyang for what would be the secretary of state’s third meeting with the North Korea leader inside his own country.
Asked about Mr Bolton’s comments, Heather Nauert, the state department spokesperson, said conversations with North Korea were continuing. She added that Mr Pompeo did not have any trips to Pyongyang to announce at present.
“We knew that this would be a road. We knew that the road would, certainly, take some time and we’re in the middle of that process right now,” said Ms Nauert.
Mr Pompeo, who is leading the nuclear talks, has been the strongest supporter of Mr Trump’s approach to North Korea. At a testy Senate hearing two weeks ago, he responded, “Fear not, senator, fear not” after facing suggestions from a Democrat that the Trump administration had “been taken for a ride” regarding Pyongyang’s commitments to denuclearisation.
At the hearing, he conceded that North Korea was still producing fissile material. But he said the fact that it had partly dismantled a missile facility was progress. 38 North, a website that focuses on North Korea, on Tuesday said Pyongyang appeared to have further dismantled the launch facility in the eastern part of the country near China.
But critics claim North Korea has done nothing to suggest it will abandon its nuclear programme, and point to reports that the regime is still building long-range ballistic missiles near Pyongyang.
Mr Trump recently thanked Mr Kim for returning 55 boxes of remains that North Korea said were US soldiers who died in the 1950 Korean war. But Mr Bolton said on Tuesday that the fact Pyongyang had not returned the remains of other soldiers showed that it was not serious about improving relations with the west and its neighbours in Asia.
“What a nation that was truly committed to turning the page would do here is to return the remains of all the foreign soldiers, South Korean soldiers, Australians, others who were in the UN coalition in the early 1950s . . . as well as American soldiers,” he said. “There is no point in withholding the remains from a conflict that long ago.”
