Trump ‘will walk out’ if North Korea talks not fruitful

US President Donald Trump says that if his planned talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un are not fruitful he will “walk out”. At a joint news conference, he and Japanese PM Shinzo Abe said maximum pressure must be maintained on North Korea over nuclear disarmament. Mr Abe is at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida for talks. Earlier, Mr Trump confirmed that CIA Director Mike Pompeo had made a secret trip to North Korea to meet Mr Kim.
He said Mr Pompeo had forged a “good relationship” with Mr Kim – whom the US president was last year calling “little rocket man” – and that the meeting had gone “very smoothly”. The visit marked the highest-level contact between the US and North Korea since 2000. Mr Trump is expected to hold a summit with Mr Kim by June. Details, including a location, are still being worked out. Meanwhile, South Korean president Moon Jae-in is set to meet Mr Kim next week.
Speaking on Thursday, Mr Moon said North Korea had said it was ready for “complete denuclearisation”, and called for “bold imagination and creative solutions” to ensure the Koreas summit and the Trump-Kim summit would succeed. President Trump said at the joint news conference that if he did not think the meeting would be successful he would not go, and if the meeting went ahead but was not productive, he would walk out. “
Our campaign of maximum pressure will continue until North Korea denuclearises,” he added. “As I’ve said before, there is a bright path available to North Korea when it achieves denuclearisation in a complete and verifiable and irreversible way. It would be a great day for them, it would be a great day for the world.”
Experts have speculated that a location for talks could be the Demilitarised Zone between North and South Korea, another Asian country, or a neutral European country. North Korea has been isolated for decades because of its human rights abuses and pursuit of nuclear weapons, in defiance of international laws and UN sanctions.
It has carried out six nuclear tests, and has missiles that it says could reach the US. But South Korea’s hosting of the Winter Olympics in February gave an unexpected window for diplomacy, and in the weeks since there have been a flurry of visits to the North from China, South Korea and now the US.