Joe Biden trying to meet North Korea’s Kim Jong-un ‘without preconditions’, senior White House official says
- Pyongyang has not responded positively to the offer but it’s ‘still on the table’, says national security spokesman John Kirby
- The US president is set to host a summit with Japan and South Korea, at which North Korea’s nuclear and missile programme will be a major agenda item
“They have not responded positively to that offer, but it’s still on the table. We are willing to sit down and negotiate without preconditions,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby said in an interview.
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The offer of a top-level meeting, disclosed by Kirby without specifying when the offer was made, suggests the Biden administration is stepping up efforts to reach out to North Korea.
In a related development, Mira Rapp-Hooper, National Security Council senior director for East Asia, revealed at a think tank event on Wednesday that the administration has been making a particular effort to invite North Korea to come to the table in recent weeks.
She said that such attempts have intensified since a US soldier stationed in South Korea crossed the heavily armed border into North Korea without authorisation a month ago.
Referring to Pyongyang’s lack of response to the Biden administration, Kirby said: “But absent that, and thus far he has shown no interest in that, we’ve got to make sure that we are ready in every other respect to defend our national security interests and those of our Korean and Japanese allies.”
“That means putting more capability in the region which we have, and we will certainly consider doing that again in the future if we have to,” he added.
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Kirby said that “there could be some sort of provocative action, but we just don’t know what that’s going to look like and it wouldn’t be a good use of our time in worrying too much about that.”
At the US presidential retreat of Camp David near Washington, Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol will agree to boost their deterrence capabilities to better respond to North Korea’s belligerence as well as China’s rising military power, according to senior officials who are involved in preparations for the summit.
Meanwhile, Kim visited typhoon-hit farms and oversaw military helicopters spraying pesticides in a bid to salvage key crops, state media said on Friday.
Tropical Storm Khanun made landfall last week in the North, a country where natural disasters can be devastating due to weak infrastructure and widespread deforestation, which increases vulnerability to flooding.
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The visit came hours after the UN Security Council accused the North Korean regime of spending heavily on its nuclear arms programme while its people go hungry and lack basic necessities.
On Thursday, South Korea’s spy agency told lawmakers that around 240 North Koreans had starved to death between January and July this year, member of parliament Yoo Sang-bum told reporters after the briefing.
Kim visited rice paddy fields in Kangwon province that had been flooded by the typhoon, but predicted a “complete recovery from the damage” thanks to the patriotism of soldiers who helped salvage the crop, the Korean Central News Agency reported.
KCNA images showed Kim, in a white jacket and trousers, squatting at the edge of the paddy field while military helicopters sprayed crops.
The North Korean leader said the rapid response of the military to the typhoon damage had been “performing a miracle of recovering flooded farmland in a brief span of time”.
On Thursday, Seoul’s spy agency said people were starving in the North, with the country’s economy trapped in a “vicious cycle” with negative growth for three years from 2020 to 2022.
The North’s domestic product experienced a significant drop of 12 per cent in 2022 compared to 2016, the agency told lawmakers during a briefing, according to lawmaker Yoo.
The number of North Koreans said to have died due to hunger between January to July was more than double the recent annual average of 110.
Despite its difficult economic situation, Pyongyang has conducted a record-breaking series of weapons tests this year, including its first solid-fuel ballistic missile – which experts say is a major technological breakthrough.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
