“I don't want talk about increasing sanctions [on North Korea]; they're strong,” President Donald Trump said Thursday. | Dien Bien/Getty Images North Korea Nuclear Summit Trump: I 'fully' understand why North Korea wouldn't denuclearize

President Donald Trump acknowledged Thursday that North Korea is not ready to wind down its nuclear weapons program, telling Fox News' Sean Hannity that he understands how much work the country has put into its arsenal.

Trump spoke with Hannity after two days of meetings on denuclearization with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam. Trump cut short that summit on Thursday after it became clear no deal could be reached.


In a clip of Trump’s interview that aired on “Fox & Friends,” Trump said Kim only “wanted to denuke certain areas, and I wanted everything.”

“The sanctions are there, and I didn't want to give up the sanctions unless we had a real program, and they're not ready for that and I understand that fully, I really do,” he said. “I mean, they spent a lot of time building it. But that doesn't mean the world has to be happy. But I wanted them to denuke.”

Trump said in a news conference after the summit that Kim demanded total relief from sanctions in exchange for incremental steps toward denuclearization, something to which Trump was unwilling to agree.

“They were willing to denuke a large portion of the areas that we wanted but we couldn’t give up all of the sanctions for that,” he told reporters.

Even in walking away from a deal in Hanoi, Trump signaled that his personal relationship with Kim had affected his thinking on U.S. policy toward North Korea. Asked by a reporter from South Korea if he planned on heaping more sanctions on North Korea to pressure Kim back to the negotiating table, the president said that he was seeing things from a new perspective.

“I don't want talk about increasing sanctions; they're strong,” he said before wrapping up his news conference. “They have a lot of great people in North Korea that have to live also, and that’s important to me. I would say this: My whole attitude changed a lot because I got to know, as you know, Chairman Kim very well, and they have a point of view also.”