Heads of state ‘were laughing with me,’ not at me

Lavrov and others defended the 2015 Iran deal at a U.N. Security Council meeting chaired by Trump about non-proliferation. Pompeo will visit Pyongyang again next month to prepare for a second summit.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who proposed a meeting with Ri in NY, expressed hopes of traveling to Pyongyang.

His visit to Pyongyang next month will be his fourth this year.

The current U.S. administration “seems determined to render all global institutions ineffectual”, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told the General Assembly, criticising the USA for backing out on the nuclear deal. If President Trump continues to moderate some of the hostility with the North, the once unthinkable-peaceful denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula-will become possible.

In his UN address past year, Trump bashed the nuclear deal as “an embarrassment”, signalling that the United States was ready to walk away.

During his United Nations address Tuesday, the president said Iran does not respect its neighbors or their borders, and accused Iranian leaders of fueling the crisis in Syria. He said any future summit could happen in October, but more likely after that.

“The United States stands ready to export our abundant affordable supply of oil, clean coal, and natural gas”, Trump told the United Nations General Assembly.

On Wednesday, however, Trump thanked Chinese President Xi Jinping during a U.N. Security Council meeting, saying working with the Chinese leader on the North Korea issue “has been a pleasure and an honor”.

Since that meeting, Trump said he has seen a “number of encouraging measures” that few could have imagined only a short time ago.

“I spoke before this body past year and warned that the U.N. Human Rights Council had become a grave embarrassment to this institution, shielding egregious human rights abusers while bashing America and its many friends”, he recalled.

Moon also said while it was “natural” to be suspicious of North Korea’s true intentions, the situation is “completely different” this time largely due to its leader’s eagerness to transform the impoverished country into an economic powerhouse.

He said that preventing Iran from exporting oil would be “very unsafe”.

“I think we will make a deal”, he said.

“Standing up for America and the American people” and “standing up for the world” are not mutually exclusive, he argued.

Asked later about what intervention he might be considering in Venezuela, Trump said he’s looking very strongly at the possibility, given the disgusting things happening there. It added that it would be willing to take further steps to end its nuclear programmes such as closing its nuclear test site, if the United States takes unspecified corresponding measures and honours the agreement signed in June at the first-ever summit between leaders of North Korea and the US. It looks like just the opposite.