SEOUL — North Korea said that nuclear talks with the United States have broken down and denied the Trump administration’s characterization of them as a “good discussion.”
A statement by the Foreign Ministry called the negotiations “sickening” and said that Washington has until the end of the year to reverse its hostile policies toward North Korea if it wants talks to resume.
The two sides met in Stockholm on Saturday to restart nuclear negotiations after eight months of stalemate over denuclearization and sanctions.
The top North Korean nuclear envoy, Kim Myong Gil, said Saturday night that the working-level talks had broken off “entirely due to the United States’ failure to abandon its outdated viewpoint and attitude.”
State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus disputed those comments, saying they did not reflect “the content or spirit of today’s 8 1/2-hour discussion.”
She said Washington brought “creative ideas” and “a number of new initiatives” to the talks.
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry shot down her comments on Sunday, however, saying the United States “repeated vague claims about the need for a continued and focused negotiations,” adding that Washington is “misleading the public by touting ‘good discussions.’”
President Donald Trump said in September that he was open to exploring a “new method” in talks with North Korea. Kim Myong Gil, the envoy, had quickly responded at the time with a statement welcoming the”new method” in place of the “Libyan model” of shipping out North Korea’s nuclear weapons before granting sanctions relief.
The Libyan model of denuclearization had been promoted by John Bolton, the former national security adviser to Trump who was ousted earlier that month.
Chad O’Carroll, the CEO of Korea Risk Group, said Pyongyang could have come to Stockholm with a “radical expectation” about the United States after Trump fired Bolton and floated a possibility of a “new method” in talks.
“Ahead of what is likely to be a bumpy election campaign for Trump in 2020, it appears that the North may be hoping that the combined effect of the ticking clock and American fears of long-range missile and nuclear tests in the year ahead will stimulate a significant shift in U.S. strategy at the eleventh hour,” O’Carroll said in an analysis posted on NK Pro website.
The North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman denounced Washington for “exploiting the DPRK-U.S. talks for its domestic politics,” in the statement, referring to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Saturday’s talks were the first since Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam in February. Trump’s personal diplomatic overtures to him, including an informal meeting at the Korean Peninsula’s demilitarized zone in June, were put to a test as Pyongyang resumed weapons tests.
North Korea tested a new submarine-launched ballistic missile on Wednesday, days before the nuclear talks with Washington were set to resume.
Kim Myong Gil said that whether Pyongyang breaks its self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and missile testing “entirely depends on the stance of the United States.”
Sunday’s statement from the Foreign Ministry said the “sickening negotiations” will not be resumed unless Washington takes measures to “completely and irreversibly withdraw hostile policies” towards the North Korean regime.
At his first meeting with Kim Jong Un last year, Trump called an end to military exercises on the Korean Peninsula before getting concrete disarmament promises in return, a move that took officials in Pentagon and Seoul by surprise.
The United States and South Korea has since scaled down the joint military drills, but Pyongyang accused Washington of reneging on its commitments and threatened resumption of missile tests.
Experts say Trump’s past two summit meetings with Kim Jong Un failed to produce a concrete progress in nuclear disarmament due to the lack of substantive working-level talks to iron out details in advance.
“Trump’s engagement of Kim has been top-down and summit-driven, but one of the lessons from Hanoi is that there needs to be more bottom-up problem solving,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha Women’s University in Seoul.
Earlier this year, the two leaders headed to the Vietnamese capital for a fanfare-filled summit without having narrowed down critical differences at the senior expert level. The summit collapsed without a deal as North Korea demanded a large package of sanctions relief for what the United States viewed as too few denuclearization steps.
Van Jackson, a former Pentagon official, said the breakdown of talks in Stockholm reveals the risks of Trump’s personal diplomacy.
“From North Korea’s perspective, there is nothing to be gained from working-level talks as long as Trump is a doormat,” said Jackson, a lecturer at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington.
He said Pyongyang is likely to boycott further working-level meetings with Washington in favor of planning another summit with Trump, and could possibly turn back to weapons testing in the future.
The State Department said Washington is willing to resume discussions with Pyongyang in two weeks, which Pyongyang dismissed as “groundless” the following day.
“Now that we have clearly suggested the solutions to the United States, the fate of U.S.-DPRK talks depends on the United States’ stance, and the deadline is the end of this year,” the Foreign Ministry said.