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South Korea Says It’s Considering Holding Talks With North Korea

South Korea’s Blue House presidential office confirmed a news report that it’s mulling a meeting with its reclusive neighbor

South Korea Says It’s Considering Holding Talks With North Korea
A woman walks past an advertisement depicting the Korean Peninsula to promote the inter-Korean summit in Seoul, South Korea. (Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) -- South Korea said it’s considering holding talks with North Korea in efforts to help improve relations between the latter and the U.S. since their summit fell apart in Vietnam last month.

South Korea’s Blue House presidential office confirmed a Yonhap News Agency report that it’s mulling a meeting with its reclusive neighbor. Both the U.S. and North Korea “absolutely don’t want” to revert to the situation before 2017 when there was conflict and confrontation, Yonhap cited an unidentified high-level official at the Blue House as saying.

U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un walked away from the negotiation table in February without a plan to denuclearize Pyongyang. Since then, North Korea has blamed the U.S.’s “gangster-like” demands for the breakdown in talks and threatened to halt further negotiations with Trump.

The U.S. and North Korea have come too far to revert to its contentious past, and even though the Hanoi summit fell apart, the two parties have "clearly expressed talks will go on,” Yonhap said, citing the official.

To contact the reporters on this story: Hooyeon Kim in Seoul at hkim592@bloomberg.net;Jihye Lee in Seoul at jlee2352@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Shamim Adam at sadam2@bloomberg.net

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