{"id":154346,"date":"2018-02-26T03:02:13","date_gmt":"2018-02-26T08:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=154346"},"modified":"2018-02-26T03:02:13","modified_gmt":"2018-02-26T08:02:13","slug":"white-house-takes-cautious-approach-on-north-korea-overeture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/02\/26\/white-house-takes-cautious-approach-on-north-korea-overeture\/","title":{"rendered":"White House takes cautious approach on North Korea overeture"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The<\/a>
The White House says it will wait and see whether a new overture by North Korea for talks with the United States means it is serious about disarming, a step President Donald Trump and other world leaders agree must be the outcome of any future dialogue. (Photo<\/a> by angela n.\/Flickr,<\/a> CC BY 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 The White House says it will wait and see whether a new overture by North Korea for talks with the United States means it is serious about disarming, a step President Donald Trump and other world leaders agree must be the outcome of any future dialogue.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will see,\u201d was the response from White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was on the Korean peninsula Sunday as a member of the U.S. delegation attending the Olympic games in South Korea. The delegation was led by Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter.<\/p>\n

Sanders said President Trump remains committed to achieving the \u201ccomplete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization\u201d of the peninsula and that his \u201cmaximum pressure campaign\u201d against North Korea must continue until it abandons its nuclear and missile programs.<\/p>\n

Trump imposed fresh sanctions against North Korea late last week as part of the pressure effort.<\/p>\n

During Sunday’s closing ceremony for the games, the office of South Korean President Moon Jae-in announced that a North Korean delegate to the Olympics said his country is willing to hold talks with the U.S. The move comes after decades of tensions between the two countries, which have no formal diplomatic relations, and a year of escalating rhetoric, including threats of war, between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.<\/p>\n

The North has \u201cample intentions of holding talks with the United States,\u201d Moon’s office said. The North’s delegation also agreed that \u201cSouth-North relations and U.S.-North Korean relations should be improved together,\u201d the statement said.<\/p>\n

Sanders said the U.S., South Korea and the\u00a0international\u00a0community \u201cbroadly agree\u201d that denuclearization must be the outcome of any dialogue with North Korea. She said North Korea has a bright path ahead of it if it chooses denuclearization.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will see if Pyongyang’s message today, that it is willing to hold talks, represents the first steps along the path to denuclearization,\u201d she said in a written statement. \u201cIn the meantime, the United States and the world must continue to make clear that North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs are a dead end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump once scolded Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who favours diplomacy with North Korea over military confrontation, for \u201cwasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,\u201d which is Trump’s derisive nickname for North Korea’s leader.<\/p>\n

At the Olympics opening ceremony earlier this month, the North Korean leader’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, shared a VIP box with Moon and Vice-President Mike Pence, who led a separate U.S. delegation, creating some awkward moments. Though Pence stood to cheer the entrance of the U.S. team, he remained seated when athletes from North and South Korea marched together behind a \u201cunification\u201d flag, leaving Moon to instinctively turn around and shake Kim’s sister’s hand.<\/p>\n

Pence and Kim Yo Jong did not speak. Pence’s office claimed afterward that the North pulled out of a planned meeting at the last minute.<\/p>\n

During her visit, Ivanka Trump sat in the same box with Kim Yong Choi, vice chairman of North Korea’s ruling Worker’s Party Central Committee. They did not appear to interact when Jae-in shook hands with dignitaries at the beginning of Sunday’s closing ceremony.<\/p>\n

Trump stepped up the pressure campaign against North Korea on Friday by slapping sanctions on scores of companies and ships accused of illicit trading with the pariah nation. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the U.S. has now blacklisted virtually all ships being used by the North.<\/p>\n

Trump has vowed to use force if necessary to prevent North Korea from acquiring a nuclear-tipped missile that could strike the U.S. mainland. At a White House news conference on Friday, he warned that the U.S. would move to \u201cphase two\u201d in its pressure campaign if sanctions don’t work. Trump said such a step could be \u201cvery rough\u201d and \u201cvery unfortunate for the world.\u201d He did not elaborate.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we can make a deal it will be a great thing. If we can’t, something will have to happen,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 The White House says it will wait and see whether a new overture by North Korea for talks …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":154202,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24157,16],"tags":[9869,5923,1509,47268],"class_list":["post-154346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-american-news","category-news","tag-donald-trump","tag-kim-jong-un","tag-north-korea","tag-us-united-states-north-k","mauthors-darlene-superville","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154346\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}