Second summit with North Korea is on
US President Donald Trump said his second summit with North Korea would take place later in February in Vietnam, and also reported headway in talks with the Taliban.
Delivering his state of the union address, Trump hailed his diplomacy with North Korea and seized on the drama of the setting to reveal his longplanned second summit with leader Kim Jong-un.
He said he would meet Kim on February 27 and 28.
“Our hostages have come home, nuclear testing has stopped, and there has not been a missile launch in 15 months,” Trump said.
“If I had not been elected president, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea.
“Much work remains to be done, but my relationship with Kim is a good one,” he said.
The two leaders will need to work out the meaning of North Korea’s promise in Singapore of “denuclearisation”, with Kim envisaging an end to all weapons in the peninsula rather than quickly giving up the arsenal built for decades by the totalitarian dynasty.
North Korea special US envoy Stephen Biegun was due to head for talks in Pyongyang to prepare for the summit.
However, according to a UN panel of experts, North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programmes remain intact and Pyongyang is using airports and other facilities to shield its weapons from possible strikes.
The panel said that sanctions against North Korea were ineffective, with Pyongyang still able to acquire illegal shipments of oil products, sell banned coal and violate an arms embargo.
“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile [programmes] remain intact,” the report said, using the official name for North Korea.