North Korea's version of the Trump-Kim summit's failure was truer than Trump's, U.S. officials concede

(Image credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

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.

On Thursday night, an unidentified senior State Department official reiterated that North Korea "basically asked for the lifting of all sanctions," but he conceded that the sanctions were only those imposed by the United Nations Security Council since March 2016, not earlier ones tied to Pyongyang's nuclear program. "So Kim was indeed seeking a lot of relief — including the lifting of bans on everything from trade in metals, raw materials, luxury goods, seafood, coal exports, refined petroleum imports, raw petroleum imports," or those that hurt the civilian economy, AP explains. "But Kim wasn't looking for the lifting of sanctions on armaments."

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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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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.