President Donald Trump is "literally not fazed at all," according to a Trump friend, who said the president remains convinced he has, and has always had, the upper hand in the upcoming negotiations. | Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images Trump brushes off North Korea's threat to cancel summit The president said he will still insist on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he will still insist on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, appearing to brush off threats from North Korea to call off a historic summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un if the U.S. demands "unilateral nuclear abandonment.”

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump said he's not backing off that stance. And when asked if Kim's threat to skip their announced meeting was a bluff, Trump said his administration had not been notified of anything by its North Korean counterpart.


"We'll see what happens," he added.

Trump and other White House officials are so far so far viewing the threats as more like chest-thumping — and a potential bid for negotiating leverage — than a true sign that Kim may cancel the upcoming summit scheduled for June 12 in Singapore, according to several White House officials.

Noting that it was Kim who originally sought the meeting, they said that planning will continue on the assumption that Trump and Kim will meet next month. The president himself is "literally not fazed at all," according to a Trump friend, who said the president remains convinced he has, and has always had, the upper hand in the upcoming negotiations.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said earlier on Wednesday that the president was always prepared for potentially "tough negotiations" with his North Korean counterpart.

In an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Sanders sought to downplay the North Korean warning that it may cancel the summit if ongoing joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises are not called off and if the U.S. insists on unilateral denuclearization. She said such tough talk from Pyongyang "is not something that is out of the ordinary in these types of operations."

"Look, as the president has said time and time again, we're ready to meet and if it happens, that's great. And if it doesn't, we’ll see what happens. We're still hopeful that the meeting will take place and we'll continue down that path," Sanders said. "We’ve been prepared that these could be tough negotiations. The president is ready if the meeting takes place. And if it doesn't, we’ll continue the maximum pressure campaign that's been ongoing."

The threat of cancellation from North Korea marks the most significant bump in the road to date of the planning of the Trump-Kim summit, a face-to-face that months ago seemed all but impossible amid the heated rhetoric and name-calling between the two men. What remains unclear is whether North Korea, which has a history of offering summits in return for concessions from the U.S. and others only to renege on its offer, is sincere in threatening to pull out of the summit or is simply posturing for a stronger negotiating position.

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Beyond threatening to pull out of the planned meeting, North Korea signaled early Wednesday that it was not interested in a “one-sided” summit with the U.S. in which it would be pressured to give up its nuclear weapons.

The statement from Kim Kye Gwan, North Korea’s first vice foreign minister, was issued through the North’s state-run Central News Agency. It came just hours after the Yonhap News Agency, the Seoul-based media outlet, reported that the North had abruptly canceled a high-level meeting with South Korea scheduled for Wednesday and was considering withdrawing altogether from the highly anticipated meeting between Trump and Kim over the ongoing military exercises.

The first vice foreign minister took direct aim at Trump, stating, "if President Trump follows in the footsteps of his predecessors, he will be recorded as more tragic and unsuccessful president than his predecessors, far from his initial ambition to make unprecedented success."

A large chunk of the North Korean message was devoted to criticizing John Bolton, Trump’s hawkish national security adviser, who has said the U.S. is considering the “Libya model” in its approach to Pyongyang. It appeared as if the Kim regime may be trying to drive a wedge between Bolton and Trump.

“We shed light on the quality of Bolton already in the past, and we do not hide our feelings of repugnance towards him,” Kim Kye Gwan said in the statement, according to a translation. “If the Trump administration fails to recall the lessons learned from the past when the DPRK-U.S. talks had to undergo twists and setbacks owing to the likes of Bolton and turns its ear to the advice of quasi-‘patriots’ who insist on Libya mode and the like, prospects of upcoming DPRK-U.S. summit and overall DPRK-U.S. relations will be crystal clear.”

The Libya model refers to then-Libyan dictator Muammar Qadhafi’s decision to give up his nuclear program in an international deal during the early 2000s. Qadhafi was ousted from power and killed in the wake of the 2011 Arab spring movement that included a NATO-led intervention. The message from the North Koreans was that they had no intention of losing their power that way.

That North Korea might infuse what had previously been relatively smooth preparations with potentially derailing rhetoric was mostly unsurprising to those who have worked with the Kim regime in the past. An official from the administration of former President George W. Bush who was involved in the so-called "six-party talks," held from 2003-2007 and aimed at denuclearizing the Korean peninsula, said the Trump administration "should have anticipated this, they should not have been surprised by this."

"The North Koreans have excelled in selling the same horse over and over and over again," the official said. "They're taking advantage of Trump, who doesn’t know the history of all of this."

An official from the administration of former President Barack Obama offered a similar message of caution in dealing with the Kim regime.

“This is Kim Jong Un reasserting his control over this,” said Wendy Sherman, a former senior Obama official with past North Korea negotiating experience. “He may have had to reassure his military that the wasn’t precipitously giving up his nuclear weapons. And John Bolton’s discussion of Libya undoubtedly hit a nerve since Qadhafi was killed after he gave up his nuclear program."

“There will be ups and downs. You have to be ready for these gut punches," she continued. "They’re not our pals. They’re not on the same page.”

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), a member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, was similarly unsurprised by North Korea's move to heighten tensions. He said plans for a Trump-Kim summit always called for "cautious optimism" and that such negotiations have always been "fragile."

"We’ve been here before and with higher hopes in these north Korea talks come the possibility for higher disappointment because the Kim Jong Un family has had a history of propaganda and then disappointment," Gardner told NPR. "This fragile state that we’re in, Kim Jong Un trying to rearrange the deck, to so speak — the chairs on the deck, so to speak, is a set back, in a way. It’s not a surprise and it’s certainly not insurmountable going forward."

Laura Rosenberger, a former National Security Council official with expertise on North Korea, wrote on Twitter that Pyongyang, is “calculating there is space between” Trump and Bolton, “and testing who is in driver seat. Their hope appears to be that Trump will conclude Bolton is threatening his prized Summit and throw him under the bus.”

Still, the White House is insisting that there is no derailment of the planned summit between Trump and Kim. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has already made two trips to Pyongyang in recent weeks, making him the first known U.S. official to meet with a North Korean leader since then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright met with Kim Jong Il in 2000. Last week, Pompeo returned from North Korea with three Americans who had been detained by the North Korean regime.

Plans for a meeting between Trump and Kim, along with the released American prisoners and photos of Pompeo and the North Korean leader shaking hands, have marked a dramatic warming in the relationship between the two nations that spent many of the previous months exchanging especially heated rhetoric. As recently as last summer, North Korea had ramped up its ballistic missile testing program and had tested its most powerful nuclear device to date, while Trump pointedly refused to take the prospect of military action against Kim off the table and threatened to destroy his regime with "fire and fury like the world has never seen."

Despite the return to bellicose language, the State Department on Tuesday vowed that talks to set up the summit would “absolutely” go on, with spokeswoman Heather Nauert pushing back on the characterization of the military drills as provocative.

She pointed to Kim’s own past remarks on the drills to a delegation of South Korean officials, whom he reportedly told that he “understands” their position on the matter.

“Kim Jong Un had said previously that he understands the need and the utility of the United States and the Republic of Korea continuing in its joint exercises,” Nauert told reporters roughly an hour after Yonhap broke news of North Korea's threat. “They’re exercises that are legal. They are planned well, well in advance.”

A South Korean defense ministry spokeswoman said Wednesday that her nation's military exercises with the U.S. would go on as planned, according to the Associated Press. Those exercises, she said, are drills intended to improving pilot skills and are not attack exercises.

And while his nation is not involved in the military exercises in question, Japan's Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasutoshi Nishimura told the AP that his government views them as a key to regional security. He said Japan would continue its role in preparations for the planned summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un but that the U.S., Japan and South Korea agree on keeping sanctions in place on North Korea until its policies change.

"We believe that steady implementation of U.S.-South Korea joint military exercise is important to maintain the regional peace and safety," Nishimura said.

North and South Korean officials were poised to hold a meeting on Wednesday at a border village to discuss efforts to reduce tensions and restart reunions for families separated by the Korean War, according to Yonhap. It is not clear when, or whether, the meeting will be rescheduled.

Nahal Toosi. Michael Crowley and Eliana Johnson contributed to this report.