WASHINGTON, May 17, 2018 — Even as the White House continues “watching” North Korea’s resumed saber-rattling, Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway told reporters Thursday that President Donald Trump is “ready” for his planned summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un under the right conditions.
“We’re watching the situation you saw this morning that North Korea, apparently, allegedly, sent out a statement about South Korea,” Conway said. But this president made very clear from the beginning that if the conditions were right, he would go and have this summit.”
Although the White House recently announced that the summit — the first between an American president and a North Korean leader — would take place June 12 in Singapore, those plans have appeared uncertain in recent days after the North canceled planned talks with the South over the latter’s participation in annual joint military exercises with the United States, and after the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency published a bellicose statement from North Korean vice foreign minister Kim Gye Gwan which rejected the Trump administration’s demands for complete denuclearization.
“[If] the U.S. is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested in such dialogue and cannot but reconsider our proceeding to the DPRK-U.S. summit,” said Kim, who is not related to Kim Jong Un, the third member of his family to lead what has become an internationally-isolated hereditary dictatorship.
Despite the setbacks, she stressed that Trump’s leadership had seen “seven weeks of strong activity” with regard to the North, referring to now-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s two trips to meet with Kim Jong Un — including his second trip to recover three Korean-Americans who the regime had detained for a number of years.
Conway called the detainees’ return “a bipartisan, nonpartisan issue” which “makes everybody very happy.”
As for whether or not the summit will go off as planned, Conway said the United States has not yet heard from Pyongyang outside from what has been reported in the media in the days since White House National Security Adviser John Bolton made a round of television appearances in which he called for the North to undertake a disarmament plan akin to those previously executed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Moammar Kadaffi.
But the North appears to view Bolton’s advocacy for such an outcome as code for regime change, as both Hussein and Kadaffi met their ends at the hands of their enemies after their governments were toppled. Gaddafi was executed in 2011 after he was overthrown during Libya’s civil war, and Hussein was hanged in 2006 in the wake of America’s 2004 invasion of Iraq.
Both dictators’ fates apparently weigh heavily on the North Korean regime, with Kim Gye Gwan calling Bolton’s demand “essentially a manifestation of awfully sinister move[s] to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq, which had been collapsed due to the yielding of their countries to big powers” rather than “n expression of intention to address the issue through dialogue.”
The “world knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq, which have met a miserable fate,” he said.