N Korea must send clear sign of change: Seoul

Bloomberg

North Korea, a country in a “time warp” that feeds paranoia at home with propaganda about a hostile world, could
secure its future by laying the groundwork for talks on its nuclear weapons program, according to South Korea’s
foreign minister.
While Kang Kyung-wha welcomed a two month hiatus in North Korean provocations after a rapid-fire series
of missile tests from the middle of
this year, she said the isolated state needs to do more to defuse tensions that have escalated not only between Seoul and Pyongyang but between the regime and the US under the presidency of
Donald Trump.
“We very much hope there will come a point when we have North Korea at the table discussing denuclearization,” Kang said in an interview on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Danang, Vietnam. “But before we can do that they need to continue to not provoke and we have seen that for the past two months,” she said. “We need a clear sign of a change of course from North Korea.”
Kang, 62, added that South Korean officials are discussing what that sign would be among themselves and with US counterparts. In her role since June, Kang couched talks as being very much in North Korea’s own interest. The country is impoverished as leader Kim Jong Un pushes ahead with a massive weapons program designed to give him the ability to hit the US mainland with a nuclear warhead.
“It is a country caught up in its own time warp if I could put it that way, a very insular closed society that does not understand what is going on in the outside world,” she said. “And it constantly feeds this propaganda of a hostile world out there that they need to protect themselves from and this gives them strength, which is completely misguided.”
“Missiles and nuclear capability will not secure their future,” Kang said. “Their future will be better secured when they see they need to join the rest of the world.”