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SEOUL: Pyongyang squandered the opportunity to fundamentally reinvent its relationship with the United States during the presidency of Donald Trump, Washington’s top envoy to North Korea said on Thursday (December 10), adding that it will urge its successors to continue their commitment. .
Speaking to a group of experts in Seoul during a visit to meet with South Korean security officials, US Undersecretary of State Stephen Biegun admitted that he was disappointed that denuclearization negotiations had stalled and did not Further progress was made during the time he led those efforts.
“Unfortunately, our North Korean counterparts have missed many opportunities in the past two years, who have too often been looking for obstacles to negotiations rather than taking opportunities for engagement,” he said, based on his prepared remarks.
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Still, he defended Trump’s decision to focus on high-level diplomacy with leader Kim Jong Un and to avoid small steps in favor of pursuing a major deal under which North Korea would surrender its nuclear weapons and the two sides would normalize. the relationships.
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“This view was bold, and it bothered many advocates of incrementalism,” Biegun said.
After exchanging insults and nuclear threats that had brought their countries to the brink of war, Trump and Kim first met in Singapore in 2018, where they signed a blanket statement calling for denuclearization and new relations between the two old men. adversaries.
After the work-level talks that Biegun helped lead, the two leaders held their second meeting in the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi in 2019, but failed to reach an agreement.
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Subsequent talks made no progress and Pyongyang has rejected Biegun’s calls for further engagement, saying the United States does not seem serious about abandoning its hostile policies.
Biegun called on North Korea to resume talks in the coming months.
Given that Democratic President-elect Joe Biden will replace Trump in January, Biegun said he had a message for the incoming team: “The war is over; the time for conflict is over and the time for peace has come.”
