North Korea's version of the Trump-Kim summit's failure was truer than Trump's, U.S. officials concede
After the Hanoi nuclear summit between President Trump and Kim Jong Un abruptly fell apart on Thursday, the two sides offered significantly different versions of what had gone wrong. "So who's telling the truth?" The Associated Press reports. "In this case, it seems that the North Koreans are," and the sticking point was "a demand they have been pushing for weeks in lower-level talks."
In a news conference right after the talks crumbled, Trump said that "basically," the North Koreans "wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn't do that." North Korean officials held a rare middle-of-the-night press conference to counter Trump, saying Kim had asked only for partial sanctions relief in return for shutting down North Korea's main nuclear complex and possibly agreeing in writing to permanently end all nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests.
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The State Department official said Trump's team had decided that lifting those civilian sanctions would still have given North Korea "many, many billions of dollars," which Pyongyang could use to fund its missile program. Kim's proposal "was definitely a robust demand," AP says. "But it wasn't, as Trump claimed, all the sanctions."
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