Trump, North Korea to revive summit
WASHINGTON — After a week of hard-nosed negotiation, diplomatic gamesmanship and no shortage of theatrics, President Donald Trump announced Friday that the historic nuclearweapons summit he had cancelled with North Korea's Kim Jong Un is back on.
The June 12 meeting in Singapore, the first between heads of the technically still-warring nations, is meant to begin the process of ending North Korea's nuclear program, and Trump said he believes Kim is committed to that goal.
The announcement puts back on track a high-risk summit that could be a legacy-defining moment for the American leader, who has matched his unconventional deal-making style with the mercurial Kim government.
Despite recently envisioning Nobel laurels, Trump worked on Friday to lower expectations for a quick breakthrough.
“We're going to deal, and we're going to really start a process,” Trump said. He spoke from the South Lawn of the White House after seeing off a senior Kim deputy who spent more than an hour with him in the Oval Office. Much had been made of a letter his visitor was bringing from the North Korean leader, but Trump's comments left it unclear when he had even managed to take a look at it.
Kim’s arrival in Washington — in a small caravan of SUV’s from New York — came a day after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that he was confident negotiations with Pyongyang were “moving in the right direction.”
The two countries, eying the first summit between the U.S. and the North after six decades of hostility, have also been holding negotiations in Singapore and
the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas.
Early Thursday, Trump told reporters “we are doing very well” with North Korea. He added there may even need to be a second or third summit meeting to reach a deal on North Korean denuclearization but still hedged, saying “maybe we’ll have none.”
Kim Yong-chol left his hotel in New York City early Friday for the trip to Washington in a convoy of SUVs. Pompeo, the former CIA chief who has travelled to North Korea and met with Kim Jong-un twice in the past two months, said he believed the country’s leaders are “contemplating a path forward where they can make a strategic shift, one that their country has not been prepared to make before.”
Yet he also said at a news conference that difficult work remains including hurdles that may appear to be insurmountable as negotiations progress on the U.S. demand for North Korea’s complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization.
“We will push forward to test the proposition that we can achieve that outcome,” he explained.
Despite the upbeat messaging in the United States, Kim Jongun, in a meeting with Russia’s foreign minister on Thursday, complained about the U.S. trying to spread its influence in the region, a comment that may complicate the summit plans. “As we move to adjust to the political situation in the face of U.S. hegemonism, I am willing to exchange detailed and in-depth opinions with your leadership and hope to do so moving forward,” Kim told Sergey Lavrov.
North Korea’s flurry of diplomatic activity following an increase in nuclear weapons and missile tests in 2017 suggests that Kim is eager for sanctions relief to build his economy and for the international legitimacy a summit with Trump would provide. But there are lingering doubts on whether he will ever fully relinquish his nuclear arsenal, which he may see as his only guarantee of survival in a region surrounded
by enemies.
Trump views a summit as a legacy-defining opportunity to make a nuclear deal, but he has left the world guessing since cancelling the meeting last week in an open letter to Kim that complained of the North’s “tremendous anger and open hostility.” North Korea’s conciliatory response to that letter appears to have put the summit back on track.
Kim Yong-chol is the most senior North Korean visitor to the United States since Vice Marshal Jo Myong-rok visited Washington in 2000 to meet then-president Bill Clinton and secretary of state Madeleine Albright.
That was the last time the two sides, which are technically at war, attempted to arrange a leadership summit.
It was an effort that ultimately failed .
Kim Yong-chol, vice chairman of the North Korean ruling party’s central committee, was allowed into the United States despite being on a U.S. sanctions list.