A HISTORIC SUMMIT
Trump, Kim open momentous talks in Singapore
SINGAPORE — President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un came together for a momentous summit Tuesday that could chart a course for historic peace or raise the specter of a growing nuclear threat, with Mr. Kim saying the sit-down was a “good prelude for peace” and Mr. Trump pledging that “working together we will get it taken care of.”
In a meeting that seemed unthinkable just months ago as the leaders traded insults, Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim met with staged ceremony at a Singapore island resort. They shook hands warmly in front of a row of alternating U.S. and North Korean flags and then moved into a roughly 40minute one-on-one meeting, joined only by their interpreters, before including their advisers.
For all the upbeat talk, it
remained to be seen what, if any, concrete results the sitdown would produce.
“We are going to have a great discussion and I think tremendous success. We will be tremendously successful,” Mr. Trump said before their private session.
Mr. Kim said through an interpreter: “It wasn’t that easy to come here. We have a past that held our ankles (to keep us from moving forward). Wrong prejudice and practices have also covered up our eyes and ears. We have come here after overcoming all those” obstacles.
Aware that the eyes of the world were on a moment that many people never expected to ever see, Mr. Kim remarked that many of those watching “will think of this as a scene from a fantasy ... science fiction movie.”
In the run-up to the meeting, Mr. Trump had predicted the two men might strike a nuclear deal or forge a formal end to the Korean War in the course of a single meeting or over several days. But on the eve of the summit, the White House unexpectedly announced Mr. Trump would depart Singapore by Tuesday evening, raising questions about whether his aspirations for an ambitious outcome had been scaled back.
The meeting was the first between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader. A lunch meeting with the leaders and their aides featured beef short rib confit along with sweet and sour crispy pork.
Critics of the summit leapt at the handshake and the moonlight stroll Mr. Kim took Monday night along the glittering Singapore waterfront, saying it was further evidence that Mr. Trump was helping legitimize Mr. Kim on the world stage as an equal of the U.S. president. Mr. Kim has been accused of horrific rights abuses against his people.
Mr. Trump responded to that commentary Tuesday on Twitter, saying “our hostages” are back home and testing, research and launches have stopped.
The summit capped a dizzying few days of foreign policy activity for Mr. Trump, who shocked U.S. allies over the weekend by using a meeting in Canada of the Group of Seven industrialized economies to alienate America’s closest friends in the West. Lashing out over trade practices, Mr. Trump lobbed insults at his G-7 host, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Mr. Trump left that summit early and, as he flew to Singapore, tweeted that he was yanking the U.S. out of the group’s traditional closing statement.
As for Singapore, the White House said Mr. Trump was leaving early because negotiations had moved “more quickly than expected” but gave no details. On the eve of the meeting, weeks of preparation appeared to pick up in pace, with U.S. and North Korean officials meeting throughout Monday at a Singapore hotel.
The president planned to stop in Guam and Hawaii on theway back to Washington.
Mr. Trump spoke only briefly in public on Monday, forecasting a “nice” outcome. Mr.Kim spent the day mostly out of view — until he embarked on the late-night sightseeing tour of Singapore, including the Flower Dome at Gardens by the Bay, billed as the world’s biggest glass greenhouse.
Less than a year ago, Mr. Trump was threatening “fire and fury” against Mr. Kim, who in turn scorned the American president as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” As it happens, the North Korean and the American share a tendency to act unpredictably on the world stage.
Beyond the impact on both leaders’ political fortunes, the summit could shape the fate of countless people — the citizens of impoverished North Korea, the tens of millions living in the shadow of the North’s nuclear threat, and millions more worldwide. Or, it could amount to little more than amuch-photographed hand shake.
As Mr. Trump sought to build a bridge with Mr. Kim, he was smashing longtime alliances with Western allies with his abrasive performance at the G-7 and angry tweets directed at Mr. Trudeau and sent from aboard Air Force One as Mr. Trump flew from Quebec to Singapore.
Trump advisers cast his actions as a show of strength beforethe Kim meeting.
Alluding to the North’s concerns that giving up its nuclear weapons could surrender its primary deterrent to forced regime change, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters that the U.S. was prepared to take action to provide North Korea with “sufficient certainty” that denuclearization “is not something that ends badly forthem.”
He would not say whether that included the possibility of withdrawing U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula, but said the context of the discussions was “radically different than ever before.”
However, Mr. Pompeo also held firm to Mr. Trump’s position that crippling diplomatic and economic sanctions will remain in place until North Korea denuclearizes — and said they would even increase if diplomatic discussions did not progress positively.