U.S., North Korea Trade Blame for Failed Summit by Jonathan Cheng, Vivian Salama and Timothy W. Martin – Wall Street Journal
The U.S. and North Korea blamed each other for their failure to reach an agreement at their second summit aimed at curbing Pyongyang’s nuclear-weapons program, leaving an uncertain path for one of President Trump’s signature foreign-policy issues.
After the summit’s abrupt end—an elaborately laid hotel lunch table was left untouched—Mr. Trump said North Korea sought total sanctions relief without offering enough in return.
North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho contradicted him by saying Pyongyang made reasonable proposals for partial sanctions relief that the U.S. rejected.
“I am never afraid to walk from a deal,” Mr. Trump said after the summit ended.
The president said he hadn’t committed to a follow-up summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un but didn’t close the door to future negotiations, saying that “eventually we’ll get there.” Meanwhile, Mr. Trump said Mr. Kim pledged not to conduct testing of “rockets and nuclear.”
This week’s meeting was intended to lead to the first tangible moves toward North Korea’s nuclear disarmament. Instead, it demonstrated the perils of Mr. Trump’s top-down approach to diplomacy, as the two sides entered Vietnam’s capital with different expectations of the trade-offs that could clinch a deal—details that would ordinarily be bridged first during lower-level talks…