The reports came fast and furious from Manila the other day. Hello, sweetheart, give me rewrite! North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho says the North will never negotiate on nuclear or missiles! North Nixes Tillerson Talk Offer!

North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho in Manila for the ASEAN Regional Forum (Photo: AP/Aaron Favila)
The stories were breathless, and they were wrong. Anyone familiar with the North’s statements knows that over the past month there has been a major shift in Pyongyang’s formulation about negotiating.

The real story starts with Kim Jong Un’s remarks on July 4, after the North’s first ICBM test-launch, Kim Jong Un introduced a new element to the North’s public position on the nuclear issue. He said:

[T]he DPRK would neither put its nukes and ballistic rockets on the table of negotiations in any case nor flinch even an inch from the road of bolstering the nuclear force chosen by itself unless the US hostile policy and nuclear threat to the DPRK are definitely terminated.

In the past month, that formulation has been repeated several times (at least five) in DPRK media. Significantly, it appeared in the August 7 Government statement responding to the recent UNSC sanctions. Government statements are not chopped liver. They are vetted, and possibly written, at the highest levels of the regime.

Read the source article at 38 North