US, S/Korea, Japan vow ‘complete’ N/Korea denuclearization

The United States, South Korea and Japan reaffirmed their commitment to the “complete denuclearization” of North Korea on Saturday, as Pyongyang continues to reject disarmament ahead of possible talks with Washington. Speculation is mounting over a potential meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at next month’s APEC summit in China, with Trump making repeated overtures to Pyongyang for nuclear talks.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun and his Japanese counterpart Toshimitsu Motegi “reaffirmed their resolute commitment to the complete denuclearization” of North Korea during talks on Friday on the sidelines of a Group of 20 (G20) meeting in Atlanta in the US state of Georgia, the US State Department said. They also pledged “full implementation” of UN Security Council resolutions, including a ban on supporting revenue for North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.

Despite long-running UN sanctions, North Korea, which is backed by Russia and China, has enshrined its status as a nuclear-armed state in law, with its regime repeatedly declaring its atomic arsenal permanent and irreversible. – Open to meeting – Trump has made repeated overtures to Pyongyang for nuclear talks, while scaling back joint military drills with ally South Korea.

The mercurial US leader even bucked long-held US policy last year by conceding that North Korea was already “sort of a nuclear power”, while reaching out to Pyongyang for talks, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting — a suggestion that went unanswered. Analysts and South Korea’s spy agency say Kim may have conveyed Pyongyang’s position on potential talks with Trump to Beijing during a recent visit to the Chinese border city of Dandong.

South Korea’s dovish President Lee Jae Myung — who has repeatedly offered Pyongyang talks without preconditions — suggested in September that Washington seek a freeze, rather than the immediate elimination, of the North’s nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief. Critics have said such an approach risks tacitly accepting North Korea as a nuclear-armed state while allowing Pyongyang to win sanctions relief without giving up its arsenal.

Analysts say China may also be moving towards tacit acceptance, pointing to the omission of North Korean denuclearisation from statements after Kim and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in June. Pyongyang denounced a joint statement on Saturday by a group of nations monitoring sanctions implementations against it, vowing that “the stereotyped sanctions racket of the US and the West can neither influence the position of the DPRK (North Korea) as a nuclear weapons state”.