National security adviser says US is prepared to take action if North Korea delivers its 'Christmas
Source: CNN
By Kevin Liptak, Aileen Graef and Devan Cole,
(CNN)National security adviser Robert O'Brien said Sunday the US is prepared to take action if North Korea fulfills its promise to deliver a "Christmas gift," including a potential long-range missile test.
"If Kim Jong Un takes that approach, we'll be extraordinarily disappointed and we'll express that disappointment," O'Brien said on ABC's "This Week" when asked whether the US would respond to a long-range test.
North Korea had previously threatened a "Christmas gift" if the US doesn't provide concessions like sanctions relief by its self-imposed, year-end deadline. The Trump administration had widely interpreted the promise of a "Christmas gift" to mean a weapons test, especially as intelligence indicators grew. Though no such tests have been detected from North Korea since Christmas, officials have remained watchful in the days following the holiday.
American officials say they don't believe they are out of the woods yet and are closely monitoring events on the Korean Peninsula, according to a senior administration official.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/29/politics/robert-obrien-north-korea-christmas-gift/index.html
FULL title: National security adviser says US is prepared to take action if North Korea delivers its 'Christmas gift'
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Pompeo- US government policy is abundantly clear, economic sanctions and UN security council sanctions, will not be eased until the goal of full final denuclearization is achieved. (VOA Korea News broadcast, 4.6.2018)
According to US observers in the mainstream media, the trust issue only works one way, it is the North only that can't be trusted.
(Source- BK News Briefing 12.12.19 ) Clearly South Korea is one of the parties suffering greatest harm from the mutual distrust between the US and North Korea.
The US went through some bargaining to get UN resolution 2387 passed. If one actually reads the UN resolution 2387 of Dec. 22, 2017, it:
26. Reaffirms its support for the Six Party Talks, calls for their resumption, and reiterates its support for the commitments set forth in the Joint Statement of 19 September 2005 issued by China, the DPRK, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation, and the United States, including that the goal of the Six-Party Talks is the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula in a peaceful manner and the return of the DPRK to the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards at an early date, bearing in mind the rights and obligations of States parties to the NPT and underlining the need for all States parties to the NPT to continue to comply with their Treaty obligations, that the United States and the DPRK undertook to respect each other’s sovereignty and exist peacefully...
The language of the resolution was negotiated carefully among Russia, China and the US to include the reference to the Sep 2005 joint statement for a reason because the Joint Statement of 19 September 2005 also says this:
Joint Statement of the Fourth Round of the Six-Party Talks
- September 19, 2005
5) The six parties agreed to take coordinated steps to implement the aforementioned consensus in a phased manner in line with the principle of "commitment for commitment, action for action."
This is the so called step by step approach which the US doesn't follow and every time this issue is brought up, the US side claims it demonstrates "flexibility" which is in fact an evasion of the principle. Only Japan supports this approach. None of the other six parties do. In fact, Trump and his appointees have explicitly and consistently rejected the six party approach and only gave lip service to it, to achieve adoption of the principal UN sanctions resolution directed at the North Korean missile and nuclear weapons program.
There is absolutely no sign that the US negotiating position has changed since the debacle at Hanoi where Trump walked away from the talks. One wonders whether a change is even possible given Trump's weak political position and the bi-partisan hard line position of the entire inside the beltway establishment.
Nothing is left to be desired on the US side apparently. The US offered nothing at Hanoi, but made unprecedented demands not reflected in the joint statement from Singapore. Nothing further was offered at the Panmunjom "summit," just a photo op for Trump.
Last April, a former South Korean National Intelligence Service analyst suggested, that the negotiating process was so subject to US domestic political influences, that it was likely that the White House "team" would just string North Korea along with the phony dichotomy of bad state to state relations between North Korea and the United States (maximum pressure), juxtaposed with the absurd "love relationship" between Donald Trump and Kim. The analyst proffered the scenario whereby North Korea and the US public are strung along for the necessary length of time, and then a confrontation similar to that in 2017 emerges with the possibility of war greater than ever during a key period of the 2020 election campaign.
