Donald Trump offers Kim Jong-un guarantee: surrender nukes, stay in power

Donald Trump has offered Kim Jong-un a guarantee: surrender your nuclear arsenal and stay in power — or meet the same fate as Colonel Gaddafi.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Donald Trump offered Kim Jong-un a guarantee last night that he would remain in power if he surrendered his nuclear arsenal as doubts continued to swirl over whether the summit planned for next month would take place.

Speaking in the Oval Office, Mr Trump appeared to make a direct appeal to the North Korean leader, assuring him that if he disarmed he would not meet the same fate as Colonel Gaddafi of Libya, who gave up his nuclear weapons in 2003, only to be toppled by a western-backed uprising in 2011. However, if the North did not relinquish its weapons, he warned, that is exactly what would happen.

Asked if the US would offer security guarantees for Mr Kim, Mr Trump said: “I’m willing to do a lot . . . he’ll get protections that will be very strong.”

Mr Trump added: “In Libya we decimated that country. There was no deal to keep Gaddafi.”

He was willing to offer very different terms to North Korea. “This would be something with Kim Jong-un — he’d be there, he’d be running his country. His country would be very rich — his people are tremendously industrious,” Mr Trump said.

“We never said to Gaddafi: ‘we’re going to give you protection, we’re going to give you military strength, all of these things . . . if we make a deal, Kim Jong-un is going to be very, very happy.”

Former Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi in 2011.

The move appears to mark a significant shift in US policy. Until now the US had not made any concrete concessions to Kim beyond agreeing to a meeting, which the North Korean leader had first sought.

North Korea threatened this week to back out of a meeting between Mr Trump and Kim that had been set for June 12 in Singapore.

The US, the North alleged, was trying to push Kim into the kind of “unilateral nuclear abandonment” agreed to by Gaddafi. The warning from Pyongyang came after John Bolton, the US national security adviser, said that the White House would try to apply “the Libya model” to North Korea.

Mr Trump said last night that the North had shifted its tone towards the US after Kim recently met President Xi of China. Mr Trump suggested that Mr Xi could be trying to use North Korea as leverage in a trade deal.

He added that preparations for the meeting with Kim were continuing. “Our people are literally dealing with them right now in terms of making arrangements — so that’s a lot different than what you read.”

Mr Trump has repeatedly said that he is willing to walk out of talks if he feels Kim is not negotiating in good faith. He added: “Nothing has changed with North Korea that we know of. We have not been told anything . . . we’ve heard certain things from South Korea. We’ll see what happens. If the meeting happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, we go on to the next step.”

Meanwhile, the White House press secretary said that the US military had no plans to scale down military exercises with South Korea. North Korea had objected to the drills, with North Korea’s chief negotiator calling the government in Seoul “ignorant and incompetent” and threatened to halt all talks.

The Times