Trump to meet Kim next month
WORLD: US President Donald Trump has said he will meet North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12. The president tweeted: “We will both try to make it a very special moment for world peace!”
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump has said he will meet North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12. The president tweeted: “We will both try to make it a very special moment for world peace!”
Mr Trump provided details for the first time about the history-making meeting between an American president and the leader of North Korea over denuclearisation. He had said he favoured holding the meeting at the Demilitarised Zone, the heavily fortified border separating the Koreas.
But the island nation was favoured by most of his advisers.
US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has travelled to Pyongyang twice to meet Mr Kim in recent months, in a precursor to the Trump-Kim meeting.
Mr Pompeo returned overnight with three captive Americans during his most recent trip. With the final details in place, Mr Trump and Mr Kim will meet in the first North Korea-US summit talks since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
Mr Kim has suspended nuclear and missile tests and put his nuclear programme up for negotiation, but questions remain about how serious his offer is and what disarmament steps he would be willing to take.
Earlier yesterday, with the American former prisoners by his side at Joint Base Andrews near Washington, Mr Trump said during a made-for-TV ceremony that it was a “great honour” to welcome the men back to the US, but he added that “the true honour is going to be if we have a victory in getting rid of nuclear weapons”.
Vice president Mike Pence, Mr Pompeo, other top officials and first lady Melania Trump joined the president in the celebration. The men – Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak Song and Tony Kim – had been released on Wednesday amid the warming of relations between longtime adversaries.
IT IS now almost 16 months since the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States and – love him or loathe him – three things are becoming clearer by the day.
Firstly, unlike most politicians, Donald Trump keeps his promises. A prime example of this is his campaign pledge to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Pretty much every presidential hopeful has made exactly the same pledge, but every single one, including Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama, promptly broke the promise once they gained office. Not Trump. Instead he did exactly what he said he would do, and next week the new US embassy opens in Jerusalem. Job done. Promise kept.
Secondly, Trump has a tendency to be proved right – particularly at times when perceived wisdom proclaims he is getting it badly wrong. Take, for example, relations with nuclear-armed North Korea and the volatile dictator Kim Jong-un. Years of diplomacy by the smooth and sophisticated Barack Obama achieved precisely nothing except to encourage North Korean aggression and the development of missiles that could deliver nuclear warheads to Japan and even US territory.
In comes Trump with a much rougher approach to foreign relations, ridiculously boasting he had a “bigger nuclear button” that the North Korean leader and describing him dismissively as the “little rocket man”.
The diplomatic establishment threw up their hands in horror and pundits warned that Trump was dragging the world to the brink of a nuclear war. In fact precisely the opposite happened – there has been a remarkable thawing of relations between the two Koreas and a radical de-escalation of the nuclear sabre-rattling.
Last month the two sides agreed to pursue a peace treaty and Kim Jong-un became the first North Korean leader to set foot inside South Korea. Only this week North Korea released three American detainees in preparation of a meeting between Trump and the North Korean leader. This is an astonishing turnaround, and if Trump succeeds in removing the threat of nuclear war from the region he will be a more worthy recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize than Obama ever was.
The third thing about Trump is that he has the knack of upsetting precisely the right sort of people who then get so angry they make utter fools of themselves.
Take, for example, Trump’s comments last week that violent crime had left one London hospital like a “war zone” with “blood all over the floors”.
Cue the predictable confected outrage with commentators accusing Trump of blind ignorance with no idea of the true picture in the UK.
Let’s put aside the fact that the comparison of a hospital to an Afghan war zone was originally made by a London doctor, who you might think would know what he is talking about, but what happened next was instructive.
We experienced a bank-holiday weekend of such bloody mayhem that the incidents, both in London and elsewhere in the UK, are simply too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say there were dozens of shootings, stabbings, machete attacks and acid attacks.
Trump’s language may be colourful, but can anyone seriously challenge his central point that the UK, with its rocketing levels of violent crime, is proof positive that tough gun control laws do not guarantee more peaceful societies?
So what are we to make of Trump’s decision this week, fiercely criticised in European capitals, including London, to abandon the nuclear deal with Iran signed by Obama in 2015?
On one level it is yet another promise kept. Trump was consistent on the campaign trial that he believed the Iran deal was a disaster for the West and he would rip it up if he gained power.
Almost 63 million Americans voted for that and Trump has kept faith with his supporters and delivered on his pledge.
And let us not get too starry-eyed about the bigots who run Iran, who combine brutal repression at home with the promotion of terrorism overseas.
The thought of these notorious antiSemites developing deliverable nuclear weapons chills the blood.
Of course the diplomatic experts say Trump is making a mistake over repudiating the Iran deal. The problem is these are the same experts who said he was making a mistake over North Korea.
If Trump succeeds in hampering the Iranian nuclear programme and challenging Iranian aggression, the world may in a few years come to thank him.