US, South Korea and Japan reaffirm call for North Korea’s complete denuclearisation

The United States, South Korea and Japan have jointly called on North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons, even as President Donald Trump looks for a new face-to-face meeting with leader Kim Jong Un, Al Jazeera reported.

The three countries’ top diplomats made the statement on Thursday on the sidelines of the Group of 20 gathering in Atlanta. According to a State Department readout cited by Al Jazeera, they affirmed a “resolute commitment to the complete denuclearisation” of North Korea.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun and Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi also committed to “full implementation” of UN Security Council resolutions. That includes the ban on providing revenue to Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.

Trump’s outreach to Kim

The message sits awkwardly beside Washington’s recent tone, Al Jazeera noted. Trump met Kim several times during his first term and still describes him as a “friend”. Last year he departed from long-standing American policy by saying North Korea was already “sort of a nuclear power”. More recently he has downplayed worries about the programme and said he would like to meet Kim again.

Speculation is growing that the two men could meet at next month’s APEC summit in China, which Trump is expected to attend. Al Jazeera cited analysts and South Korea’s spy agency as saying Kim may have passed Pyongyang’s position on possible talks to Beijing during a recent trip to the Chinese border city of Dandong.

Seoul’s own approach is more flexible. President Lee Jae Myung, a dovish leader who has repeatedly offered talks without preconditions, proposed in September that Washington seek a freeze of the North’s nuclear programme rather than its immediate elimination, in exchange for sanctions relief. Critics quoted by the broadcaster argue that this would quietly accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state and let it gain relief while keeping its arsenal.

Pyongyang’s stance

North Korea, which is backed by Russia and China, has written its status as a nuclear-armed state into law and describes its weapons as permanent and irreversible, according to Al Jazeera. It has repeatedly rejected demands to disarm. On Saturday it denounced a separate joint statement by a group of countries that monitor enforcement of sanctions against it, saying the “stereotyped sanctions racket” of the US and the West could not shake its position as a nuclear weapons state.

Cyber theft adds pressure

Separately, the BBC reported that two blockchain analytics firms, TRM Labs and Chainalysis, have identified the North Korean Lazarus Group, also known as TraderTraitor, “with high confidence” as the likely culprit in the $6.3bn hack of the Binance exchange. A Binance spokesperson said on Friday that about 80% of the stolen assets had been secured, while the rest remained unaccounted for. Experts accuse Kim’s government of relying on cybercrime to fund itself, which Pyongyang has long denied.

It remains unclear whether a Trump–Kim meeting will take place, and on what terms. Washington’s formal line on complete denuclearisation and the president’s own overtures point in different directions, and Pyongyang has given no sign of changing course.