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| US President Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un walk together before their working lunch during their summit at the Capella Hotel on the resort island of Sentosa, Singapore |
North Korea no longer poses a nuclear threat, nor is it the โbiggest and most dangerous problemโ for the United States, President Donald Trump said on Wednesday on his return from a summit in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
The summit was the first between a sitting US president and a North Korean leader and followed a flurry of North Korean nuclear and missile tests and angry exchanges between Trump and Kim last year that fuelled fears of war.
โEverybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,โ Trump said on Twitter.
โThere is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!โ
On Tuesday, Trump told a news conference after the summit that he would like to lift sanctions against the North but that this would not happen immediately.
North Korean state media lauded the summit as a resounding success, saying Trump expressed his intention to halt US-South Korea military exercises, offer security guarantees to the North and lift sanctions against it as relations improve.
Kim and Trump invited each other to their respective countries and both leaders โgladly accepted,โ the Northโs Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
โKim Jong Un and Trump had the shared recognition to the effect that it is important to abide by the principle of step-by-step and simultaneous action in achieving peace, stability and denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula,โ KCNA said.
Trump said the United States would stop military exercises with South Korea while North Korea negotiated on denuclearisation.
โWe save a fortune by not doing war games, as long as we are negotiating in good faith โ which both sides are!โ he said on Twitter.
U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said Trumpโs reasoning for halting the exercises was โridiculousโ.
โItโs not a burden onto the American taxpayer to have a forward deployed force in South Korea,โ Graham told CNN.
โIt brings stability. Itโs a warning to China that you canโt just take over the whole region. So I reject that analysis that it costs too much, but I do accept the proposition, letโs stand down (on military exercises) and see if we can find a better way here.โ
Speaking in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said he hoped all parties could โgrasp the moment of positive changesโ on the peninsula to take constructive steps towards a political resolution and promoting denuclearisation.
โAt this time, everyone had seen that North Korea has halted missile and nuclear tests, and the United States and South Korea have to an extent restricted their military actions. This has de facto realised Chinaโs dual suspension proposal,โ he told a daily news briefing.
โWhen it comes to Trumpโs statement yesterday that he would halt South Korea and the United Statesโ military drills, I can only say that Chinaโs proposal is indeed practical and reasonable, is in line with all sidesโ interests and can resolve all sidesโ concerns.โ
China, North Koreaโs main ally, last year proposed what it calls a โdual suspensionโ, whereby North Korea suspend nuclear and missile tests, and South Korea and the United States suspend military drills.
SURPRISE
There was some confusion over precisely what military cooperation with South Korea Trump had promised to halt.
The US-South Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every year with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month. Another major exercise is due in August.
The United States maintains about 28,500 soldiers in South Korea, which remains in a technical state of war with the North after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce not a peace treaty.
Trumpโs announcement on the exercises was a surprise even to South Koreaโs President Moon Jae-in, who has worked in recent months to help bring about the Trump-Kim summit.
Asked about Trumpโs comments, South Korean presidential spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom told reporters there was a need to seek measures that would help improve engagement with North Korea but it was also necessary to confirm exactly what Trump had meant.
Moon will be chairing a national security meeting on Thursday to discuss the summit.
Trumpโs administration had previously ruled out any concessions or lifting of sanctions without North Koreaโs commitment to complete, verifiable and irreversible steps to scrap a nuclear arsenal that is advanced enough to threaten the United States.
But a joint statement issued after the summit said only that North Korea โcommits to work towards the complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsulaโ.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is to lead the US side in talks with North Korea to implement outcomes of the summit, arrived in South Korea on Wednesday, to be greeted by General Vincent Brooks, the top US commander in South Korea, and US Charge dโAffaires Marc Knapper.
Pompeo had a meeting with Brooks before heading to Seoul, according to a pool report. He is set to meet Moon on Thursday and hold a three-way meeting with Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha and Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono.
On Tuesday, just after Trumpโs surprise announcement, a spokesman for US Forces Korea said they had not received any instruction to cease joint military drills.
Although the Pentagon said Defence Secretary Jim Mattis was consulted, current and former US defence officials expressed concern at the possibility the United States would halt the exercises without an explicit concession from North Korea lowering the threat.
CRITICS IN THE UNITED STATES
Critics in the United States said Trump had given away too much at a meeting that gave Kim long-sought international standing.
The North Korean leader had been isolated, his country accused of widespread human rights abuses and under UN sanctions for its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.
โFor North Korea, they got exactly what they wanted,โ said Moon Seong-mook, a former SouthKorean military official current head of the Unification Strategy Centre in Seoul.
โThey had a summit as a nuclear state with Kim on equal turf with Trump, got the United States to halt joint military exercises with South Korea. Itโs a win for Kim Jong Un.โ
Japanโs Minister of Defence Itsunori Onodera said that, while North Korea had pledged denuclearisation, no concrete steps had been taken and Japan would not let down its guard.
โWe see US-South Korean joint exercises and the US military presence in South Korea as vital to security in East Asia,โ Onodera told reporters. โIt is up to the US and South Korea to decide about their joint exercises. We have no intention of changing our joint drills with the US.โ
Japan would only start shouldering the costs of North Koreaโs denuclearisation after the International Atomic Energy Agency restarts inspections, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters.
The Singapore summit did not get top billing in the main state news outlets in China.
The English-language China Daily said in an editorial that while it remained to be seen if the summit would be a defining moment, the fact it went smoothly was positive.
โIt has ignited hopes that they will be finally able to put an end to their hostility and that the long-standing peninsula issues can finally be resolved. These hopes should not be extinguished,โ it said.
