North Korea ready to talk ‘at any time’ with Donald Trump

“The deal was not there – even in the concept, in the abstract sense”, said Park, a professor emeritus of worldwide relations at the University of Georgia who has visited North Korea more than 50 times.

Trump’s comments are a turnaround from his announcement on Thursday that he cancelled a plan to hold a meeting with the country’s leader Kim Jong-un because of the “open hostility” North Korea had directed at US Vice President Mike Pence earlier this week.

Vice-Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan said Mr Trump’s cancellation decision was “extremely regrettable”.

He added that North Korea released a “very nice statement” in response to his canceling the summit in Singapore. Inflammatory rhetoric from Pyongyang is nothing new, and Washington had just implied that Kim Jong Un might end up like Muammar Gaddafi, who halted his nuclear programme but was still deposed and murdered.

A top North Korean official had issued a statement Thursday evening expressing the regime’s “willingness” to sit down for a summit with the U.S. We’re talking to them now.

Trump’s announcement came after repeated threats by North Korea to pull out of the summit over what it saw as confrontational remarks by US officials. It will be hard for Moon to continue engagement with Pyongyang at the cost of widening a rift with Washington.

“I think [canceling the June 12 summit] shows how inconsistent Trump is with his policies”, a 21-year-old student at Seoul’s National University told TIME. Sitting down as an equal with the USA president would go a long way toward legitimizing his regime on the world stage and weakening the rationale for continued trade sanctions, particularly by neighbouring China. However, Trump had suggested in recent days that Kim’s more defiant tone followed a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Just before Mr Trump pulled out of the summit, it dismantled its nuclear test site at Punggye-ri in the presence of reporters from five countries including, after initial hiccups, from South Korea.

Many South Koreans were fuming on Friday after U.S. President Donald Trump cancelled a historic summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, feeling they had been cheated of a chance of a lifetime to live in peace.

But Trump also threw Moon under the metaphorical bus.

“Definitely there are people in the United States who want to use this as an excuse for their efforts to push the relationship in the direction of confrontation”, said Jia Qingguo, dean of the School of International Studies at China’s Peking University, referring to the collapse of the Trump-Kim summit.

Trump told reporters on his way to board the presidential helicopter that USA officials are in talks with North Korea after the country’s “very nice statement.” on Friday.

“This is one of the lowest points in the relationship since the normalisation of relations between the two countries”, he added.

But clearly Moon faces the greatest test of his diplomatic skills since he used his hosting role for the Winter Olympics in February to renew the push to resolve the nuclear standoff with Pyongyang.

Then, after that, a senior White House official said the North lacked judgment and had reneged on its promises ahead of the summit.

Politically, Mr Trump had invested heavily in the success of the planned summit.

A senior administration official in the U.S. later gave further details, saying North Korea had shown “a profound lack of good faith”.

Other South Koreans had concerns closer to home. Bolton appears to have won the debate, and Trump is said to have dictated the letter to him.

Renewed friendly ties between China and North Korea would make Beijing more closely aligned with Pyongyang and nervous about Washington, Shi said.

But he called the meeting a “missed opportunity”, saying “some day, I look very much forward to meeting you”.

If relations between the United States and North Korea were to deteriorate again, this would also have an impact on China. But they would have focused on ways of denuclearising the Korean peninsula and reducing tensions.