US national security advisor John Bolton denied Sunday that last week’s nuclear summit with North Korea was a failure, despite President Donald Trump coming home empty-handed.
A high-stakes second meeting to strike a nuclear disarmament deal between the North’s leader Kim Jong Un and Trump broke up in disarray Thursday, without even a joint statement.
But Bolton told CBS’s “Face the Nation” Trump’s failure in getting commitments from Pyongyang on destroying its nuclear capability should be seen as “a success, defined as the president protecting and advancing American national interests.”
The White House aide said the issue was whether North Korea would accept what the president called “the big deal” -- denuclearizing completely or something less, “which was unacceptable to us.”
“So the president held firm to his view. He deepened his relationship with Kim Jong Un. I don’t view it as a failure at all when American national interests are protected.”
The outcome in Hanoi fell far short of the pre-meeting expectations, after critics said their initial historic meeting in Singapore -- which produced only a vague commitment from Kim to work “toward complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula” -- was more style over substance.
Others pointed to a lack of preparation, with the two sides unable to bridge the gaps between them in time.
According to senior US officials, in the week leading up to the Hanoi summit the North Koreans had demanded the lifting of effectively all the UN Security Council economic sanctions imposed on Pyongyang since March 2016.
In return, Pyongyang was only offering to close a portion of the Yongbyon complex, a sprawling site covering multiple different facilities -- and the North is believed to have other uranium enrichment plants.
“Sometimes you have to walk and this was just one of those times,” an unusually downcast Trump told reporters on Thursday, adding that he would “rather do it right than do it fast.”