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Trump says he will not have ‘time game’ over N. Korea’s denuclearization

Trump says he will not have ‘time game’ over N. Korea’s denuclearization

Posted September. 28, 2018 07:58,   

Updated September. 28, 2018 07:58

한국어

U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday (local time) that he does not need to “rush” an agreement with North Korea to denuclearize the communist state.

“We’re not playing the time game,” he said at a news conference on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. “If it takes two years, three years or five months, it doesn’t matter,” Trump said. The remarks are different from U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statement that stressed completing the North’s denuclearization within President Trump’s first term in office, which ends in January 2021.

He also disclosed that he had received two letters from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “They are letters that are magnificent in the sense of his feeling for wanting to get this done,” Trump said, promising to make them public at a certain point. While Trump did not mention details about the letters, he called one of them “historic” and a “beautiful work of art.”

He also took out one of the letters from an inside pocket of his suit to show it to reporters during a meeting in New York with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. “When I showed one of the letters, just one, to Prime Minister Abe, he said this is actually a ground-breaking letter,” Trump noted.

Meanwhile, South Korean President Moon Jae-in returned home Thursday afternoon from his five-day trip to New York. “One of the most important things is putting back on track the U.S.-North Korea dialogue that had been losing steam,” a senior official at Seoul’s presidential office Cheong Wa Dae said. “(President Moon) had a candid dialogue with Chairman Kim Jong Un over denuclearization through an inter-Korean summit and delivered his message to the U.S. to initiate concrete and substantial discussions on how to denuclearize (the North).”


Jeong-Hun Park sunshade@donga.com · Sang-Jun Han alwaysj@donga.com