FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

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President Trump Confirms That Libya ‘Is Not Our Model’ for North Korea

May 17, 2018 (EIRNS)—Directly contradicting his National Security Advisor John Bolton, who last month suggested that the approach to North Korea should be the “Libya model of 2003-2004,” President Donald Trump said at a White House meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg today, that the U.S. is not going to repeat the “Libya model” in North Korea.

“The Libya model is not a model that we have at all when we are thinking of North Korea,” the President said, as reported by CBS News. “In Libya, we decimated that country.... If you look at that model with Qaddafi, that was total decimation. We went in there to beat him.”

As for the possibility that North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un might cancel the scheduled June 12 summit in Singapore, Trump said that “nothing has changed on North Korea that we know of.” He further stated that “we’re willing to do a lot. And he’s [Kim Jong-un] willing, I think, to do a lot also. And, I think we’ll actually have a good relationship, assuming we have the meeting and assuming something comes of it, and he’ll get protections that will be very strong.”

The President mentioned that Syria had never had protection. “If you look at Syria, if you look at—or if you look anywhere around the Middle East, Iraq.”

Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders had distanced the President from Bolton’s earlier remarks on the “Libya model,” saying “there’s not a cookie cutter model on how this would work. This is the President Trump model. He’s going to run this the way he sees fit.”