US weighing Libyan disarmament model for North Korea: John Bolton

National Security Advisor John Bolton listens as US President Donald Trump addresses the nation on the situation in Syria April 13, 2018 at the White House in Washington, DC. (Photo by AFP)

US President Donald Trump’s new national security adviser, John Bolton, says he is considering a “Libya model” to denuclearize North Korea, a model that Pyongyang has singled out in the past as a source of its distrust for Washington.

Speaking to Fox News on Sunday, Bolton said he was thinking of employing a similar plan to what the US and its allies did by dismantling Libya’s weapons of mass destruction starting in 2003.

The White House has “very much in mind the Libya model from 2003, 2004,” he said, a process that saw former Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s make a full disclosure about the weapons programs his country was running, information that were later on verified by American officials.

Like they did in Libya, the Americans would seek to destroy any nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons program that North Korea might be running, he added.

But Bolton, an architect of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, refused to acknowledge Libya’s fate after it gave up its weapons.

The former US envoy to the UN said the Trump administration needed to seeks hard evidence that Pyongyang was moving toward denuclearization.

“In the case of Libya, for example—and it’s a different situation in some respects—those negotiations were carried out in private. They were not known publicly,” Bolton said in a separate interview with CBS News.

“But one thing that Libya did that that led us to overcome our skepticism was that they allowed American and British observers into all their nuclear-related sites. So, it wasn’t a question of relying on international mechanisms. We saw them in ways we have never seen before.”

Soon after the disarmament, various political groups in Libya declared war against each other and the country became so destabilized that, in 2011, the US and its allies decided to intervened militarily and oust Gaddafi. This ultimately led to Gaddafi’s capture, beating, and death at the hands of rebels.

The chaos took a turn for the worse once Daesh and other Takfiri terror groups rose to power in parts of Libya. The country has never been able to recover from the crisis.

North Korea has on several occasions pointed to Libya model as a cautionary tale for any country that accepts Western offers for disarmament.

“It has been shown to the corners of the earth that Libya’s giving up its nuclear arms was used as an invasion tactic to disarm the country by sugarcoating it with words like ‘the guaranteeing of security’ and the ‘bettering of relations,’” a spokesman for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said in 2011.

Today, however, it seems like Pyongyang has warmed up to the idea of disarmament after months of tension with the US and the West over its ballistic missiles and nuclear program.

On Friday, Kim said he was ready to abandon development of nuclear weapons in exchange for an official end to the Korean War and a pledge from the US government to not invade his country.