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US and North Korea suffer communication breakdown

Remember when Donald Trump said he and Kim Jong-un fell in love? Well now it seems they just don't talk anymore.


Instead, the US and North Korea appear to be staring one another down, waiting for the other to blink or make a move. And neither appears willing to give way.
Discussions aimed at setting up a second summit between the two leaders didn't happen as planned this week.
Chairman Kim's aide, the hardliner Kim Yong-chol was supposed to travel to New York and meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
But the BBC understands that the meeting was cancelled after the State Department discovered that the North Koreans didn't get on the plane as planned.
The official line is that the meeting will be rescheduled and Mr Trump said he's "very happy" with how things are going, and that he's in "no rush" while sanctions remain in place.

In Seoul, too, they are urging reporters not to read too much into the missed meeting - there have been missed meetings in the past, they say.
Although officials from the Foreign Ministry did express "disappointment".
South Korea's President Moon Jae-in warned me in his BBC interview that he expected "bumps and bruises" on the way as the international community tries to persuade North Korea to disarm.
But it's hard not to feel that both the momentum for talks and the opportunity to engage with North Korea may be slipping away.
Even at a lower level, the new US North Korean envoy Stephen Biegun has been in his job for over two months and has still not met his Pyongyang counterpart, Vice Foreign Minister Choi Sun-hui.

Complete denuclearisation?

The root of this standoff is that North Korea and the US have never really agreed on the goalposts of "denuclearisation".
What do they actually mean when they talk about disarmament? Yes the two leaders signed an agreement in Singapore, but the lack of detail in the deal we talked about back then is now coming back to haunt these talks and potentially scupper progress.
From the start, Pyongyang has been clear. They will not unilaterally disarm. They want a staged process where they give a little and get something in return.
That means, right now they feel they have done enough to warrant sanctions relief.

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