2 Korean leaders plan to meet again

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korea’s Moon Jae-in have agreed to hold their third meeting this year, as they seek to preserve a detente tested by disputes between Pyongyang and Washington.

The two Koreas announced plans Monday for Moon to visit the North Korean capital next month, the first such trip since 2007. A joint statement issued after more than three hours of talks included neither a date nor a detailed agenda, other than to advance the agreement the two leaders reached in April during their historic first meeting at the border village of Panmunjom.

“The South, together with the North, reviewed the progress of implementing the Panmunjom declaration, and discussed further methods to fulfill the declaration in a sincere manner,” the statement said. The document called for “establishing a permanent and peaceful Korean Peninsula peace regime” and “complete denuclearization.”

Moon will have a tricky balancing act at the summit: maintaining momentum for inter-Korean dialogue while also nudging Kim to make progress on denuclearization with the U.S., an ally of South Korea. Since Kim met President Donald Trump in June, the two sides have failed to make much headway on eliminating North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

“It’s not a state of crisis with North Korea and the U.S., but it’s more of a deadlock in progress,” said Lee Jong-seok, who served as unification minister under former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun. “North Korea was going to use progress toward denuclearization as a strategy to demand a quicker declaration for the end of the war. Kim Jong Un didn’t know that it would be used against him.”

U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has pressed other countries to continue enforcing sanctions against Kim’s regime while seeking a concrete time frame for Kim to abandon his nuclear weapons. North Korea has rejected his approach, with state-run media lambasting the United States’ “pressure diplomacy.”

The summit between Kim and Moon could set the stage for a second meeting between the North Korean leader and Trump — the U.S. news site Axios has reported it may come during U.N. meetings in September.