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“Kim Jong Un is too smart and has far too much to lose, everything actually, if he acts in a hostile way,” Trump wrote in a pair of tweets. “He does not want to void his special relationship with the President of the United States…”
According to KCNA, the test produced a “successful result,” was of “great significance,” and will “change the strategic position of North Korea in the near the future.” However, it was not immediately clear what was tested.
If the test proves to be of a missile, it would set a record for the most missile launches North Korea has ever conducted in a year, according to Bruce Riedel of the Heritage Foundation. Riedel is among North Korea analysts who have noted that the Trump administration has not taken a very tough approach with Pyongyang, declining to apply a wide range of the sanctions at its disposal against either North Korea or countries that do business with it, such as China.
The White House has also made repeated concessions to Kim, canceling and postponing the Pentagon’s joint military exercises with South Korea, most recently in November, after North Korea had objected. Those steps have not yielded progress, Klingner and others say.
“President Trump has adopted a weaker version of the Obama Administration’s strategic patience police and timid incrementalism of sanctions enforcement,” Klinger told CNN in November.
Though Trump said in his Sunday tweets that North Korea “must denuclearize as promised,” the country’s ambassador to the United Nations, Kim Song, said Saturday that denuclearization was off the table in negotiations with the US, which he claimed had been a “time-saving trick” to benefit a “domestic political agenda.”
Diplomats from Pyongyang and Washington have been attempting to negotiate a trade that would see Kim give up the country’s nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles used to deliver them in exchange for relief from punishing US and United Nations sanctions that have crippled the North Korean economy.
But North Korea is seeking sanctions relief the US has so far refused to provide and working talks have failed to get off the ground. Some analysts say North Korea has little incentive to deal with lower level US officials when the President has repeatedly inserted himself into negotiations and based them, in part, on the strength of his relationship with the North Korean leader.
The potential tests this weekend should come as no surprise to Trump as Pyongyang has been threatening to do a test of some kind for some time, in part because the country is angry about not seeing sanctions relief and because the US and South Korea have continued with planning for joint military drills.
‘Dotard’ and ‘Rocket man’
Trump’s new warning could indicate a potential shift in his relationship with Kim, which he has touted as successful since he first met with the leader in 2018 in Singapore. On Saturday, the President told reporters at the White House that he has “a very good” relationship with Kim and that he thinks they both want to “keep it that way.”
“The relationship is very good, but you know, there is certain hostility, there’s no doubt about it,” Trump said.
But as Trump noted, his relationship with North Korea hasn’t always been rosy. In August 2017, the President threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if Kim continued to threaten the US.
“If any language and expressions stoking the atmosphere of confrontation are used once again on purpose at a crucial moment as now, that must really be diagnosed as the relapse of the dotage of a dotard,” Choe Son Hui, North Korea’s First Vice-Foreign Minister, was quoted as saying by the country’s state news agency.
The statement was the latest in a series of increasingly dire warnings by North Korea, and recalled the strong language between the two leaders that escalated in 2017, before the landmark meeting the following year in Singapore.
CNN’s Nicole Gaouette, Joshua Berlinger, Yoonjung Seo and Jonny Hallam contributed to this report.
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