Trump takes credit for Koreas’ summit, declares ‘war to end’
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump claimed credit Friday for a historic inter-Korean summit and insisted the United States was “not going to be played” by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Trump said the U.S. had narrowed down to two or three locations his planned meeting with Kim. The U.S. president pushed back against critics who doubt the North Korea dictator is really willing to give up the nuclear weapons his nation took decades acquiring.
“I don’t think he’s ever had this enthusiasm for somebody, for them wanting to make a deal,” Trump said in the Oval Office as he met German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “We’re not going to be played, OK. We’re going to hopefully make a deal. The United States in the past has been played like a fiddle.”
“That’s not happening to us. We will, I think, come up with a solution. And if we don’t, we will leave the room,” Trump said.
He spoke hours after Kim became the first North Korean leader to visit south of the demarcation line between the two Koreas, meeting with President Moon Jae-in. They pledged in a joint statement to seek a formal end to the Korean War by year’s end and to rid their peninsula of nuclear weapons, without specifying how it would be achieved.
“When I began, people were saying that was an impossibility,” Trump said earlier during an appearance with U.S. athletes who participated in this year’s Winter Olympics in South Korea. “They said there were two alternatives: Let them have what they have, or go to war. And now we have a much better alternative than anybody thought even possible.”
The Kim-Moon meeting was the culmination of a rapprochement that was inspired by the February games.
Responsibility for turning a bold vision for peace into reality will in large part rest with Trump, who has often vowed to succeed where his predecessors as president have failed in eliminating the North Korean nuclear threat to America. His former CIA director and new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met Kim four weeks ago in North Korea to lay the groundwork for the Trump-Kim summit, tentatively scheduled for May or early June.
“I did get the sense that he was serious,” Pompeo told reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he was making his first trip as top U.S. diplomat.
Pompeo said the economic pressure on North Korea spearheaded by Trump “has led [Kim] to believe that it is in his best interests to come to the table to talk about denuclearization.”
But Pompeo added a word of caution: “I am always careful. There is a lot of history here. Promises have been made, hopes have been raised and then dashed.”
Major uncertainty still surrounds North Korea’s commitment to “denuclearize” and what it would demand in return. Starting in the early 1990s, the North has built up an atomic arsenal as a deterrent against a U.S. invasion and as a safeguard for the continuance of its totalitarian regime.