This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Donald Trump said on Sunday it was “possible” that a deal he claimed ended the nuclear threat posed by North Korea would not “work out”.

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A day after it was reported that Pyongyang has increased its production of enriched uranium at secret sites, Fox Business broadcast an interview with the president.

Trump was pressed on whether he trusted Kim Jong-un, whom he met last month in Singapore and with whom he said he had “a great chemistry”, to make good on promises to destroy Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

“I made a deal with him, I shook hands with him, I really believe he means it,” said Trump. “Now, is it possible? Have I been in deals, have you been in things where, people didn’t work out? It’s possible.”

Trump’s words reversed his declaration upon his return from Singapore that North Korea had ended its nuclear ambitons.

“Just landed – a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” the president tweeted on 13 June. “There 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!”

Speaking to Fox, Trump also sought to shrink the perceived cost of the declared agreement falling through, seeking to frame his negotiations with North Korea as having been achieved without concessions.

“We gave nothing,” he said. “Think of this. What did I do, really, when you think of it? I went there. So the papers say, ‘He went’, oh, meaning I went to Singapore. So we had a meeting. We didn’t do anything.”

In fact, Trump agreed to end a range of joint military exercises with South Korea, meant to act as a deterrent against the North. In the interview with Fox, he said the exercises, “which I call war games”, were too expensive.

“They’re dropping bombs all over the place every six months,” he said, “it’s unbelievably expensive to do that. The planes fly in from Guam, these massive bombers. It’s crazy.”

Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, insisted that North Korea’s nuclear program could still be dismantled within a year.



NBC News and the Washington Post reported that North Korean attempts to conceal nuclear work. Earlier this week, the monitoring group 38 North reported that North Korea had made rapid improvements to a nuclear reactor.

Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, Bolton said he did not want to comment on the reports or on “anything related to intelligence” – NBC having quoted more than a dozen senior US intelligence officials and the Post four.



Bolton said Trump was not being played by Kim and was “very well aware of North Korea’s patterns of behaviour over decades of negotiating with the United States”.



He said: “We know exactly what the risks are of them using negotiations to drag out the length of time they have to continue their nuclear chemical biological weapons programs and ballistic missiles.”

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But, he added, Kim had been “very emphatic several times in Singapore he was different from prior regimes”.

“We have developed a program,” Bolton said, “…about really how to dismantle all of their WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and ballistic missile programmes in a year”.

“If they have the strategic decision already made to do that and they’re cooperative, we can move very quickly.

“And it’s to North Korea’s advantage to see these programs dismantled very quickly because then the elimination of sanctions aid by South Korea and Japan and others can all begin to flow.”

Mike Pompeo is due to meet Kim in early July. South Korean media reported on Sunday that Sung Kim, the US ambassador to the Philippines, held preparatory talks with North Korean officials in the village of Panmunjom, in the demilitarized zone.

A leading Senate foreign policy hawk, meanwhile, took a less diplomatic tone. Interviewed on NBC’s Meet the Press, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said North Korea would “regret it” if nuclear talks collapsed.



“I don’t want a war with North Korea,” Graham said. “The last best chance to avoid that war is a peaceful end to their nuclear program … if they don’t take it, and they play Trump like they’ve played everybody else, they’re going to regret it.”