U.S. President Donald Trump thinks his second meeting with the North Korean leader would be "productive".... according to his national security adviser.
This comes after Trump on Saturday said the summit would be held early next year.
Cha Sang-mi has the report.
U.S. President Donald Trump believes he needs a second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un early next year, even though the regime has failed to follow through with pledges to denuclearize.
This is according to U.S. national security advisor John Bolton on Tuesday, speaking at The Wall Street Journal's annual CEO Council conference in Washington.
Bolton said (quote) "They have not lived up to the commitments so far," and that's why he thinks the President sees another summit as likely to be productive."
By commitments, he is referring to a promise -- namely the "complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" -- that Kim Jong-un made with Trump in June at the first one-on-one.
Despite no tangible progress made or set timetable for disarmament, President Trump declared that North Korea no longer posed a "nuclear threat", shortly after that meeting in Singapore.
Bolton said Washington would press ahead with another North Korea-U.S. summit shortly after the start of the new year and the administration would keep sanctions against the regime until then.
On Saturday, U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California, picked North Korea as an "urgent issue", when asked which country out of North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran posed the most serious threat to the U.S.
Citing the unanimous UN Security Council resolutions on the regime, Mattis said (quote) "They're trying little ways to work around them, but the bottom line is, if they want out from underneath the U.N. Security Council resolution sanctions, they're going to have to make progress" , once again stressing the regime's commitment to giving up its nuclear programs.
Cha Sang-mi, Arirang News.
