The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Places examined for historic talks
Five potential sites being discussed for the meeting.
Sweden and Switzerland are among the places the White House is considering for an unprecedented summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, according to people familiar with the matter.
Trump confirmed on Wednesday that he dispatched CIA Director Mike Pompeo to Pyongyang last month to meet with Kim in advance of the summit, which the U.S. hopes will lead to North Korea giving up its nuclear arsenal. The unannounced meeting indicates preparations are advancing for a summit that Trump said could take place by early June or sooner.
“Meeting went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed,” Trump said in a Twitter posting Wednesday morning. “Details of Summit are being worked out now. Denuclearization will be a great thing for World, but also for North Korea!”
Pompeo — who’s awaiting confirmation as secretary of state — is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the isolated nation since former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000. A White House official said Pompeo traveled to Pyongyang over Easter weekend, not “last week” as the president said in his tweet.
Trump told reporters Tuesday that the administration had “started talking to North Korea directly” and was discussing five potential sites for the meeting. “We have had direct talks at very high levels, extremely high levels with North Korea,” Trump said, after meeting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Any summit would likely be the start of a long and potentially fraught process aimed at persuading Kim to give up North Korea’s nuclear arsenal — something his family has held onto for decades as key to their grip on power at home and their only real external deterrent. A successful outcome might simply be an agreement for talks to continue and a plan for the next meeting.
Locations for the meeting include Geneva, an unnamed Swedish location, and venues in Asia and Southeast Asia, people familiar with the talks told Bloomberg.
“It makes the proposed summit all the more likely to happen,” said Suzanne DiMaggio, director and senior fellow at New America in New York, who facilitated the talks in Oslo that resulted in ailing U.S. citizen Otto Warmbier’s release from North Korea. “It is reassuring that the Trump administration is taking serious steps to prepare for that historic interaction.”
If Trump and Kim manage to establish a rapport, much like Trump’s first meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, it could go a long way toward overcoming tensions around Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear weapons tests and regular U.S. military drills near the Korean peninsula.
Trump’s aides believe that if the meeting leads to a thaw between the U.S. and North Korea, which at points last year seemed at the brink of war, the president and Kim could win the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Pompeo trip is part of a global diplomatic scramble after Trump’s March 8 decision to meet Kim to break the decades-long impasse over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
The clandestine visit is reminiscent of then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger’s secret diplomatic mission to Beijing in 1971. Those trips laid the groundwork for President Richard Nixon’s unexpected visit to China the following year, which paved the way to opening up the country.