NORTH KOREA/NUCLEAR/SOUTH KOREA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “A day after its leader’s historic talks with President Trump, North Korea wasted no time on Wednesday [6-13-18] spinning the results in its favor, claiming it had won major concessions from the United States. The authoritarian country’s state-controlled news media said that Mr. Trump had promised to eventually lift sanctions against the North and to end joint military drills with South Korea. It also said the United States had agreed to a phased, ‘step-by-step’ denuclearization process for the North, rather than the immediate dismantling of its nuclear capability. If the talks in Singapore on Tuesday [6-12-18] gave Mr. Trump an opportunity to play the diplomat on a grand scale, they did no less for Kim Jong-un, the North’s leader, whose country has long sought such a meeting with an American president. The state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun plastered the pages of its Wednesday edition with color photographs of Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump talking, walking and smiling, apparently as equals, with the flags of the two countries arranged side by side as a backdrop. But amid the optics, analysts were still looking for answers to questions they had been asking since March, when Mr. Trump accepted Mr. Kim’s invitation to meet: Under what terms, and by when, is Mr. Kim going to denuclearize his country? What does he mean when he says he is committed to the ‘complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula?’”
-Choe Sang-Hun, “North Korea Says It Won Major Concessions From Trump in Singapore,” The New York Times online, June 13, 2018