White House Confirms Trump Administration Contacted North Korea To ‘Continue The Negotiations’
It was revealed on Sunday that President Donald Trump‘s administration is trying to restart a failed series of denuclearization talks with North Korea in an attempt to convince its leader, Kim Jong Un, to renew previous commitments to toning down their nuclear programs.
According to The Hill, White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien confirmed to Axios that the administration set up new communication channels to talk about the possibility of reestablishing dialogue over the matter, saying they reached out and “let them know that we would like to continue the negotiations in Stockholm that were last undertaken in early October.”
“We’ve been letting them know, through various channels, that we would like to get those [negotiations] back on track and to implement Chairman Kim’s commitment,” O’Brien said.
News of the latest attempt to come to terms with North Korea comes on the heels of a birthday greeting sent by Trump to Kim Jong Un, which according to The Hill, was shared with the dictator via South Korean President Moon Jae-in.
The birthday message, on top of Trump’s budding relationship with the North Korean leader, apparently isn’t enough to convince the country to restart talks, according to one of Kim Jong Un’s top advisers.
But the fact that the North Korean leader didn’t follow through with a “Christmas gift” he said he was planning for the United States last year — which many military experts believed would come in the form of a long-range missile test as a way of flexing — gave O’Brien some level of hope that talks could soon resume.
“All we know is we were told we were going to get a Christmas gift and the Christmas gift didn’t come,” O’Brien said.
“And so I think that was an encouraging sign. But, again, that doesn’t mean we won’t see some sort of test in the future.”
As previously reported by The Inquisitr, Kim Jong Un signaled at the end of 2019 that his country will, in the near future, unveil a strategic new weapon in their military arsenal that will, they claim, ensure the country’s long-term security.
Claims of the new weapon came in the wake of a four-day Workers’ Party’s policy-making committee meeting, which was reported as a rare occurrence. The timing of the meeting and the announcement also came as the United States government failed to come through on a number of concessions requested by North Korea with regard to talks of denuclearization.
Kim Jong Un, at the time, also expressed his frustration with what he called “hostile” policies toward North Korea by the United States, which was presumably a reference to the current economic sanctions placed on the rogue, Asian nation.
