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Donald Trump.
- President Donald Trump on Thursday said North Korea's Kim Jong Un will get "protections that would be very strong" if he gets rid of his country's nukes.
- With these remarks, Trump was seemingly attempting to calm Kim and push back on the notion the US would take a Libya-style approach to North Korea by allowing Kim to be taken out.
- In late April, White House national security adviser John Bolton said the Trump administration was "looking at the Libya model of 2003, 2004" in terms of North Korea and denuclearization.
President Donald Trump on Thursday said North Korea's Kim Jong Un will "get protections that would be very strong" if he agreed to get rid of his country's nukes.
This comes not long after reports that North Korea threatened to cancel a planned summit with Trump over ongoing joint military exercises between the US and South Korea.
With these remarks, Trump was seemingly attempting to calm Kim and push back on the notion the US would take a Libya-style approach to North Korea.
In late April, White House national security adviser John Bolton said the Trump administration was "looking at the Libya model of 2003, 2004" in terms of North Korea and denuclearization. This reportedly made officials in Pyongyang uncomfortable given the violent death of Libya's infamous leader, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011.
Gaddafi in 2003 allowed international inspectors to visit Libya to ensure its nuclear and chemical weapons programs had ceased. But after a popular uprising began in Libya in 2011, which the US and its allies supported, Gaddafi was brutally killed by rebels.
In response to Bolton's comments, North Korea's vice minister recently wrote, "World knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq which have met miserable fate. It is absolutely absurd to dare compare [North Korea], a nuclear weapon state, to Libya which had been at the initial stage of nuclear development."
Trump and Kim are tentatively set to meet in Singapore on June 12.