North Korea’s vice foreign minister Choe Son Hui said on Wednesday that North Korea will not “beg” for a summit with the U.S. and criticized Vice President Pence for comparing North Korea to Libya, Reuters reported.
“We will neither beg the U.S. for dialogue nor take the trouble to persuade them if they do not want to sit together with us,” Choe Son Hui said, according to North Korea’s central news agency.
Choe suggested North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un might reconsider the summit set for June 12 to discuss the North’s nuclear program if the U.S. offends North Korea, Reuters reported.
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She also criticized Pence for his “unbridled and impudent remarks that North Korea might end up like Libya,” according to The Washington Post’s Anna Fifield.
President Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton said last week that the administration was looking at Libya as a model for North Korea to follow.
Trump said talk of a so-called Libyan model did not apply to North Korea.
“The Libyan model isn’t a model that we have at all when we are thinking of North Korea,” Trump said last week. “In Libya we decimated that country. That country was decimated. There was no deal to keep Gaddafi. The Libyan model that was mentioned was a much different deal.”
But on Tuesday, Pence said North Korea would end up like Libya if it failed to reach a nuclear deal during the upcoming summit in Singapore.
“There was some talk about the Libyan model last week, and you know, as the president made clear, this will only end like the Libyan model ended if Kim Jong Un doesn’t make a deal,” Pence said on Fox News.
Libya’s former leader Muammar Gaddafi agreed to give up his nuclear ambitions in the early 2000s in exchange for sanctions relief. But he was forced from power with the help of NATO forces eight years later and killed in 2011 by U.S.-backed rebels.