President Trump and his top advisers expressed optimism through the weekend that diplomatic efforts on denuclearization talks with Pyongyang can be revived, despite reports of…
President Trump and his top advisers expressed optimism through the weekend that diplomatic efforts on denuclearization talks with Pyongyang can be revived, despite reports of North Korean ballistic missile and nuclear activity.
National Security Adviser John R. Bolton sought to dampen the hype around the prospect that a North Korean missile launch could be imminent after the emergence in recent days of commercial satellite imagery appearing to show cranes at work rebuilding a key test site that Pyongyang previously vowed to destroy.
“There’s a lot of activity all the time in North Korea, but I’m not going to speculate on what that particular commercial satellite picture shows,” said Mr. Bolton, who stuck during Sunday talk show appearances to the same cautious, wait-and-see message that Mr. Trump began pushing last week in response to reports of activity at the Tongchang-ri rocket launch site.
Other reports suggest that ongoing enrichment activities by the regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un have added to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons arsenal over the past year.
Mr. Bolton said U. S. intelligence sees “unblinkingly” what the North Koreans are doing and stressed that the administration has no “illusions about what their capabilities are.”
But the national security adviser stressed during an interview on ABC’s “This Week” that Mr. Trump remains “confident in his personal relationship with Kim Jong-un” and open to a third summit after talks between the two leaders broke down in Hanoi in late February.
SEE ALSO: National Security Adviser John Bolton downplays prospect of imminent North Korean missile launch
Post-summit low point
Behind the scenes, administration officials say the concept of another summit feels increasingly distant because working-level talks with the North Koreans have yet to resume.
“Both sides are going to have to digest the outcome of the summit,” one senior State Department official involved in the nuclear diplomacy said on the condition of anonymity.
In the interim, the official said, the administration’s maximum pressure through sanctions policy will “be maintained and, if the president decides, the sanctions will be increased.”
There is speculation that Stephen E. Biegun, U. S. special envoy for North Korea, will use a speech Monday at a major nuclear policy conference in Washington to announce plans for a resumption of working-level talks, but many analysts are circumspect and say uncertainty over the way forward is as deep now as it has been over the past year.
