WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump sought on Thursday to placate North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un after Pyongyang threatened to scrap an unprecedented summit, saying Kim’s security would be guaranteed in any deal and his country would not suffer the fate of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, unless that could not be reached.

In rambling remarks in the White House’s Oval Office in which he also sharply criticised China over trade, Trump said that as far as he knew the meeting with Kim was still on track, but that the North Korean leader was possibly being influenced by Beijing after two recent visits he made there.

Trump distanced himself from comments by his national security adviser John Bolton that North Korea angrily denounced when casting doubt on the summit, which is planned for June 12 in Singapore.

“North Korea is actually talking to us about times and everything else as though nothing happened,” Trump told reporters at the start of a meeting with Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Trump said he was not pursuing the “Libya model” in getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programme. Bolton has repeatedly suggested the Libya model of unilateral disarmament for North Korea, most recently on Sunday.

Gaddafi was deposed and killed after Libyans joined the 2011 Arab Spring protests, aided by Nato allies who had encouraged him to give up his banned weapons of mass destruction under a 2003 deal.

In a statement on Wednesday that threatened withdrawal from the summit, North Korea’s first vice-minister of foreign affairs, Kim Kye Gwan, derided as “absurd” Bolton’s suggestion of a deal similar to that under which components of Libya’s nuclear programme were shipped to the United States.

“[The] world knows too well that our country is neither Libya nor Iraq which have met miserable fate,” he said in apparent reference to the demises of Gaddafi and Iraq’s former president Saddam Hussain.

Trump said the deal he was looking at would give Kim — a hereditary ruler who presides over a state widely criticised for serious human rights abuses — “protections that will be very strong.” “He would be there, he would be running his country, his country would be very rich,” Trump said.

“The Libya model was a much different model. We decimated that country,” he said, adding that it would only come into play “most likely” if a deal could not be reached with North Korea.

Trump stressed that North Korea would have to abandon its nuclear weapons.

“We cannot let that country have nukes. We just can’t do it,” he said of North Korea, which has been working on missiles capable of hitting the United States.

The United States has demanded the “complete, verifiable, and irreversible” dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme.

Meanwhile, North Korea has declined to accept a list of South Korean journalists hoping to observe the closure of its nuclear test site, South Korea said on Friday, raising new questions about the North’s commitment to reducing tension.

North Korea had invited a limited number of journalists from South Korea and other countries to witness what it said will be the closing of its only nuclear weapons test site at Punggye-ri next week. The North Korean offer to scrap the test site has been seen as major concession in months of easing tension between it, on the one hand, and South Korea and the United States on the other.

But the remarkable progress appears to have been checked in recent days with North Korea raising doubts about an unprecedented June 12 summit in Singapore between leader Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump, and calling off talks with the South.

The South Korean Unification Ministry, which handles dealings with the North, said on Friday North Korea had “declined to accept” the list of journalists submitted by the South for the test site dismantling.

The ministry did not elaborate but the North Korean decision is likely to raise doubts about its plan for the test site.

On Thursday, North Korea’s chief negotiator called South Korea “ignorant and incompetent” and denounced US-South Korean air combat drills and threatened to halt all talks with the South.

China, responding to US President Donald Trump suggestion that Beijing may be influencing North Korea’s new hardline stance, said on Friday it stands for stability and peace on the Korean peninsula and for settlement of confrontation over its development of weapons through talks.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang, asked about Trump’s comments, said China’s position had not changed and he reiterated that it supported the goal of denuclearisation on the Korean peninsula.

“We are consistently supporting all relevant parties in resolving the peninsula issue through political consultations and peaceful means,” Lu told a regular briefing.

Kim has made two visits to China recently for talks with President Xi Jinping, including a secretive train trip to Beijing in late March, his first known visit outside North Korea since coming to power. He flew to the port city of Dalian this month.

Both times, Kim’s encounters with Xi were cast by Chinese state media as friendly. They included beachside strolls and Xi saying that previous generations of North Korean and Chinese leaders had visited each other as often as relatives.