WASHINGTON — In his first public comments since leaving the White House, John R. Bolton, the former national security adviser, delivered a stark warning Monday about President Trump’s approach to North Korea, undercutting the president’s yearslong insistence that North Korea wanted to make a denuclearization deal with him.
Without mentioning Mr. Trump by name, Mr. Bolton, a longtime critic of the North Korean regime, made it clear he thought the president’s courtship approach to diplomacy with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, was only increasing North Korea’s power. And while Mr. Trump has made a deal with North Korea one of his signature foreign policy goals, Mr. Bolton asserted that there had been no gains under this charm offensive approach.
“The strategic decision Kim Jong-un is operating through is that he will do whatever he can to keep a deliverable nuclear weapons capability and to develop and enhance it further,” Mr. Bolton said Monday during a speech in Washington. “Under current circumstances, he will never give up the nuclear weapons voluntarily.”
Mr. Bolton was ousted from the Trump administration less than a month ago amid disputes over how to handle major foreign policy challenges, including North Korea.
Stopping nuclear proliferation in the Korean Peninsula is where the United States needs “to focus our attention,” Mr. Bolton said, “not can we get another summit with Kim Jong-un or what the state of staff-level negotiations are to achieve a commitment from North Korea it will never honor.”
