Korea summit is on again, Trump says after meeting.
WASHINGTON — President Trump announced Friday that the summit meeting he had canceled with North Korea’s leader will be held after all, the latest twist in a nuclear-edged diplomatic drama that has captivated and confused much of the world.
The president rescheduled the get-together with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, barely a week after scrubbing it on the grounds that Kim’s government had shown “open hostility” toward his administration.
The reversal followed an Oval Office meeting Friday with a high-ranking North Korean envoy who delivered a personal letter from Kim to Trump. The envoy, Kim Yong Chol, the former North Korean intelligence chief and top nuclear arms negotiator, became the first North Korean official to set foot in the White House since 2000 and only the second ever to meet with a sitting U.S. president.
The on-again, off-again summit scheduling had all the earmarks of a television cliffhanger from a president who made a name for himself hosting a reality show on NBC for 14 years, only this time with deadly serious consequences. The session is again scheduled for June 12 in Singapore.
Trump, who has sought to impose “maximum pressure” on North Korea through economic sanctions, has insisted that it give up its arsenal of nuclear weapons, but Kim has sent conflicting signals about his willingness to consider that.
Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush each negotiated with North Korea to bring an end to its nuclear weapons program, only to have the deals ultimately fall apart. Neither one, however, ever agreed to meet with the North Korean leader, raising the stakes for Trump as he tries to achieve what they could not.
Clinton did host a North Korean official at the White House in 2000, the first time a sitting U.S. president had met with a representative of the Pyongyang government. Much like his latter-day counterpart would 18 years later, Jo Myong Rok, first vice chairman of North Korea’s National Defense Commission, delivered to Clinton a personal letter from the country’s then-leader, Kim Jong Il, the father of Kim Jong Un.
The meeting yielded good will but no sustained agreement, and Bush’s ascension to the White House a few months later brought to power a more skeptical group of officials who saw the North Koreans as untrustworthy. Among them was a State Department official named John R. Bolton — now Trump’s national security adviser.