North Korea stressed Tuesday that it will not talk to the U.S. until the latter changes its so-called “hostile policy.”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson suggested last Tuesday that the U.S. is not only ready to meet with North Korea, but willing to do so without preconditions. “It’s not realistic to say we’re only going to talk if you come to the table ready to give up your program. They have too much invested in it,” he said at the Atlantic Council-Korea Foundation Forum.
The White House immediately walked this back, asserting that the president’s position has not changed. “Given North Korea’s most recent missile test, clearly right now is not the time,” a White House National Security Council spokesman said.
“North Korea must earn its way back to the table,” Tillerson said at the U.N. Friday, reversing course completely.
While the Trump administration appears to be struggling to make up its mind on exactly what it hopes to achieve on North Korea, the North has made it clear that it is not interested in talks.
“What the U.S. seeks in proposing talks with or without preconditions is the nuclear dismantlement of the DPRK,” the state-run Rodong Sinmun argued Tuesday, emphasizing that it is not interested in such discussions.
“The DPRK has no interest in the dialogue intermittently put up by the U.S.,” the paper explained, adding, “As the DPRK has consistently insisted, the way to solve the issue between the DPRK and the U.S. is for the U.S. to drop at an early date its heinous hostile policy, which defines the DPRK as an enemy, and co-exist peacefully with the DPRK possessed of nukes.”
“As long as the U.S. hostile policy and nuclear threat toward the DPRK are not fundamentally removed,” the commentary asserted, “the DPRK will never put its nukes and ballistic missiles on the table of negotiations nor flinch even an inch from the already chosen road of bolstering up the nuclear force.”
For North Korea, the term “hostile policy” often refers to sanctions and America’s military presence on the Korean Peninsula, as well as anti-DPRK rhetoric.
“This is the fixed stand of the DPRK,” Pyongyang concluded in its statement.
North Korea has developed two different types of intercontinental ballistic missile, both of which can theoretically range the continental U.S., and detonated a suspected staged thermonuclear device.
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