According to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, US President Joe Biden’s administration is seeking a “step-by-step” strategy to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, a compromise between two prior American administrations’ opposing views.
As per the Yonhap News Agency, Sullivan also stated that the US remains dedicated to the 2018 deal signed in Singapore between Washington and North Korea, which calls for North Korea’s total denuclearization in exchange for American security assurances.
“When we came in, our strategy with North Korea was to look at the last two administrations,” Sullivan said, alluding to former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s administrations.
“Really adopted this idea of strategic patience, which was effectively, I would characterise, non-for-none,” he said about the Obama administration.
“ But then the Trump administration in Hanoi offered the grand bargain, all-for-all,” Sullivan said at a discussion hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-profit think organisation based in New York. “And the thrust and purpose of our policy was essentially to come in between the two — to be prepared to engage in diplomacy, to make incremental progress toward the eventual goal of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” he continued.
Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un twice, once in Singapore in June 2018 and again in Hanoi in February 2019.
The North agreed to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula at the first-ever US-North Korea summit in Singapore, while the US agreed to establish new relations with the North, which many believe will provide some security guarantees to the North, which is still subject to various US and UN Security Council sanctions.
“We continue to signal to them (North Koreans) both directly and publicly, as I am doing right now, that we are willing to engage in order to achieve progress on the basic issues given out in the Singapore summit back in 2018,” Sullivan added.
Since 2019, North Korea has refused to engage in denuclearization talks with the United States. “We have not gotten traction in diplomacy with North Korea on that over the course of this year,” Sullivan said of the North’s response to US overtures.
‘ US wants to take a step-by-step approach to denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula.’
