Showing posts with label summit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label summit. Show all posts

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Trump Cancels Summit With North Korea - 'No Nobel Prize For You'

Image via White House Communications Agency

Citing "open hostility" from North Korea, Donald Trump has cancelled his June 12 summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

Leaving the possibility open to a future meeting, Trump told the North Korean leader “this missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.”

Trump had high hopes that the meeting would be a huge foreign policy victory for him.

Even as observers noted the status of the summit was tenuous, folks in the U.S. were already celebrating a possible win for Trump.

Commemorative coins featuring Trump and "Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un" were designed in advance of the meeting by the White House Communications Agency.



North Korean officials were reportedly angered when Vice President Mike Pence said Mr. Kim could meet the same fate as Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, if he did not make a deal with the United States. In 2011, Libyan rebels killed Colonel Qaddafi during the Arab Spring upheavals.

The government of neighboring South Korea was blindsided by Trump’s announcement.

“We are attempting to make sense of what, precisely, President Trump means,” said government spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom.

Here's the text of Trump's letter to Kim Jong-Un:

Dear Mr. Chairman:

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore. We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant. I was very much looking forward to being there with you. 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. Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place. You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters. Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you. In the meantime, I want to thank you for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families. That was a beautiful gesture and was very much appreciated.

If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write. The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth. This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.

Sincerely yours,

Donald J. Trump
President of the United States of America

Folks from all parts chimed in:












Posted by Randy Slovacek at 11:04 AM 0 comments
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Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Trump: "There's A Substantial Chance" North Korea Summit Won't Work Out

trump2.jpg
Donald Trump

The New York Times is reporting Donald Trump's much-ballyhooed summit meeting with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-Un, may not take place as scheduled.

“There’s a very substantial chance that it won’t work out,” Mr. Trump told reporters before a meeting in the Oval Office with South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in. “It may not work out for June 12.”

Mr. Trump expressed continued enthusiasm for the diplomatic encounter, saying he believed it could usher in a period of prosperity for North Korea. But he acknowledged that recent statements by North Korea had cast a pall of uncertainty over the timing of the meeting, which is set for Singapore. He appeared as baffled as anyone else about what might come next.

“We’re moving along. We’ll see what happens,” Mr. Trump said. “There are certain conditions we want to happen. I think we’ll get those conditions. And if we don’t, we won’t have the meeting.

“If it doesn’t happen, maybe it will happen later,” he added. “Maybe it will happen at a different time. We will see. We are talking.”

According to Vox, a big part of the problem is South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

Moon is a leftist who took office in May of last year, back when Trump was threatening war with North Korea. He made a deep and concerted effort to try to broker negotiations between Trump and Kim to defuse the tension, and part of his strategy was making grandiose promises about what talks could accomplish — even floating the possibility that Trump could win a Nobel Prize to entice him to the table.

The problem, as Kelly points out, is that this was always a kind of shell game: Moon could never change the fact that the US and North Korea want fundamentally different things. Basically, he argues, this was a gambit to try to convince Trump not to go to war with North Korea — one that may yet fail.



Posted by Randy Slovacek at 11:34 AM 0 comments
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