Trump Pivots to North Korea Nuclear Programme After
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- Donald Trump told South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Friday at a G7 dinner that 'the time had come to pay attention to the North Korea issue,' now that Washington has reached an agreement with Iran.
- Lee Jae Myung told Trump that sanctions on North Korea were 'ineffective,' citing deepening military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow and warning that 'even a small amount of assistance from Russia is of great help to North Korea.'
- Kim Jong Un has sent troops and munitions to aid Russia's war in Ukraine and recently hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping in Pyongyang; neither side's official statements mentioned denuclearisation, which experts called tacit Chinese acceptance.
- Kim Jong Un has pledged to expand North Korea's nuclear capabilities and unveiled a new facility for developing nuclear bomb fuels; Pyongyang declared itself an 'irreversible' nuclear state after the 2019 Hanoi summit with Trump collapsed over denuclearisation and sanctions relief.
- North Korea is believed to possess dozens of nuclear weapons since its first test in 2006, and the two Koreas remain technically at war following the 1950-53 armistice rather than a peace treaty.
- Trump met Kim three times during his first term—including a 2018 Singapore summit where he declared they were 'in love'—but produced no tangible denuclearisation progress; he later broke decades of US policy by calling North Korea 'sort of a nuclear power.'
Why it matters: Trump's pivot follows three first-term summits with Kim that yielded no denuclearisation deal and comes after Pyongyang's 2019 'irreversible' nuclear declaration, now backed by Russian military cooperation and tacit Chinese acceptance as evidenced by Xi's recent Pyongyang visit without denuclearisation language.
