The historic summit between the North Korean President Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump may be put on hold.
North Korea on Wednesday cancelled a high-level meeting with South Korea and threatened to scrap a historic summit next month between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over military exercises between Seoul and Washington that Pyongyang has long claimed are invasion rehearsals.
The announcement from the North’s official news agency came with a message for Trump — a threat, really — that the United States, should “give serious thought” to the possible impact of the military exercises on the Kim-Trump summit, warning, “We will be closely watching the attitude of the United States and South Korean authorities.”
The surprise declaration, which came in a pre-dawn dispatch in North Korea’s state media, appears to cool what had been an unusual flurry of outreach from a country that last year conducted a provocative series of weapons tests that had many fearing the region was on the edge of war. It’s still unclear, however, whether the North intends to scuttle all diplomacy or merely wants to gain leverage ahead of the planned June 12 talks between Kim and Trump.
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Kim is testing Trump. He is trying to do precisely what his father and grandfather before him managed to pull off: extract concessions, economic and political gains while making small concessions or promises they later failed to keep.
Pyongyang’s sudden indignation at this week’s US-South Korea exercises, known as “Max Thunder,” is a sham. The annual exercises are aimed at maintaining military coordination between the United States and its ally, to remain ready in case of a North Korean attack. After all, North Korea has attacked in the past.
Army Col. Rob Manning says Exercise Max Thunder 2018 is designed to improve the abilities of the U.S. and South Korea to operate together. It began Monday and is slated to run through May 25, and is expected to include aircraft from the U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps, as it has in the past.
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“The defensive nature of these combined exercises has been clear for many decades and has not changed,” said Manning.
Pyongyang knew Max Thunder was coming. In fact, last March, shortly after visiting Pyongyang, the South Korean national security adviser said in a statement that “[Kim] understands that the routine joint military exercises between the Republic of Korea and the United States must continue. And he expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible.”
Kim is trying to find out just how much Trump is willing to do to prevent the collapse of the summit.
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