U.S. OFFICIALS IN NORTH KOREA
Trump said Sunday that a U.S. team was inside the demilitarized zone to plan a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
President Donald Trump said Sunday that a U.S. team was in North Korea to plan a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, raising expectations that the onoff-on meeting would take place.
The State Department said earlier that a team was in Panmunjom, which straddles the border inside the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, separating North and South Korea. One can cross the border by stepping across a painted line, but moving beyond several steps into the North is rare for U.S. officials.
Trump withdrew from a planned June 12 Singapore summit with Kim last Thursday, but quickly announced it could get back on track. His tweet Sunday afternoon, which offered praise for the longtime U.S. adversary, was the latest signal that his concerns about the North’s stance toward the summit had been allayed.
“Our United States team has arrived in North Korea to make arrangements for the Summit between Kim Jong Un and myself,” he tweeted. “I truly believe North Korea has brilliant potential and will be a great economic and financial Nation one day. Kim Jong Un agrees with me on this. It will happen!”
South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in said that Kim had committed in their Saturday meeting to sit down with Trump and to a “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tapped veteran American diplomat Sung Kim to handle pre-summit negotiations. A White House logistical group was sent to Singapore on Sunday to prepare in case the summit takes place.
Kim, the U.S. ambassador to the Philippines, also served as ambassador to South Korea and was part of the U.S. negotiating team that last held substantive denuclearization talks with North Korea during the George W. Bush administration in 2005.
The Korean leaders’ second summit in a month appeared to highlight a sense of urgency on both sides of the world’s most heavily armed border.
The talks, which Moon said Kim Jong Un requested, allowed Moon to push for a U.S.North Korean summit that he sees as the best way to ease animosity that had some fearing a war last year.
Kim may see a meeting with Trump as necessary to easing pressure from crushing sanctions and to winning security assurances in a region surrounded by enemies.
Moon told reporters that Kim said he’s willing to cooperate to end confrontation and work toward peace for the sake of the successful summit with Trump.
Moon said he told Kim that Trump has a “firm resolve” to end hostile relations with North Korea and initiate economic cooperation if Kim implements “complete denuclearization.”
“What Kim is unclear about is that he has concerns about whether his country can surely trust the United States,” Moon said.
Kim, in a dispatch issued by the North’s state-run news service earlier Sunday, “expressed his fixed will on the historic (North Korea)-U.S. summit talks.”
Top officials are to meet again June 1.