Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif says US President Donald Trump is not seeking “serious diplomacy” on North Korea after he failed to reach an agreement with the North Korean leader during their summit in Vietnam.
“President Trump should’ve now realized that pageantries, photo-ops & flip-flops don’t make for serious diplomacy,” Zarif tweeted on Friday, a day after Trump, a self-proclaimed “dealmaker,” cut short his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi as they failed to strike a denuclearization deal.
A downbeat Trump told reporters at a press conference that “he had to walk away” from the talks because of North Korea’s demands to lift all economic sanctions against Pyongyang as a prerequisite to denuclearization. North Korea, however, rejected the claim, saying it had expressed readiness for a complete denuclearization in exchange for a partial sanctions removal.
The US president had earlier said he was in “no rush” to seal a deal over North Korea’s nuclear program, downplaying raised expectations of a swift breakthrough in his second set of high-stake talks with Kim in Vietnam, some eight months after their first historic get-together in Singapore.
In his Twitter post, Zarif also once again defended the historic Iran nuclear agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), reached between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries in 2015.
