The Truth is Revealed Over Trump's Diplomatic Failure with North Korea

New reports are coming to light after the unexpected failure of Trump's talks with North Korea.  It turns out the Trump lied (no surprise) about how the talks broke down.  Trump had claimed that he had walked away from negotiations in Hanoi after Kim Jong Un demanded that all sanctions against the nation be lifted.  “Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn’t do that,” Trump said. “We had to walk away from that.”

But Pyongyang representatives called a late-night news conference later that day to correct Trump’s statements, saying that Kim wanted only economic sanctions imposed since 2016 lifted — and not any concerning weapons. In exchange, Kim offered to shut down the nation’s main nuclear complex — and was prepared to offer in writing a permanent halt to the nation’s nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests, according to his officials.

North Korea’s account of the sanction issue was accurate, a State Department official said Friday in a briefing to the media. The Associated Press reported that Kim had sought the lifting of only United Nations Security Council sanctions imposed since March 2016 — not sanctions going back decades. The concession would have removed sanctions on a range of goods, but not weapons.

Kim’s position was no surprise, the official said, because it had been brought up repeatedly in lower-level talks. But Trump and his negotiators decided lifting the sanctions posed from 2016 onward was too much.

Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui said Trump’s reaction puzzled Kim. She said that Kim “may have lost his will [to continue] North Korea-U.S. dealings.”