Trump suggests DMZ for ‘big event’ with Kim
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Like a consummate showman, President Donald Trump began rolling the drum Monday for his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, suggesting the “big event” take place in the Demilitarized Zone that divides the Koreas. That’s where Kim just met his South Korean counterpart.
But Trump said that the Southeast Asian city state of Singapore was also in the running to host what few would have predicted when nuclear tensions were soaring last year — the first face-to-face meeting between the leaders of the United States and North Korea. While policy experts, and even his own national security adviser, voice skepticism that North Korea is sincere about giving up its nuclear efforts, Trump sounds like he’s gearing up for a date with history, and clearly wants the backdrop to be just right.
First by Twitter, and then at a press conference in the White House Rose Garden, Trump said he likes the idea of going to the southern side of the demarcation line that separates the Koreas, where South Korean President Moon Jae-in met Kim on Friday. “There’s something that I like about it because you are there, you are actually there,” Trump said. “If things work out there’s a great celebration to be had on the site, not in a third-party country.”
There’s been much speculation about where Trump and Kim might meet. Countries in Europe and Southeast Asia, in Mongolia and even a ship in international waters have all been suggested as possible venues. Monday was the first time that Trump had publicly named potential locations.
His planned meeting with Kim will be the crucial follow-up to the summit between Kim and Moon on Friday where they pledged to seek a formal end this year to the Korean War — a conflict that was halted in 1953 by an armistice and not a peace treaty, leaving the two sides technically at war. They also committed to ridding the peninsula of nuclear weapons.
Former reality television star Trump now has to help turn the Korean leaders’ bold but vague vision for peace into reality.
“Everybody wants us. It has the chance to be a big event,” the president said on a bright spring day in Washington, alongside Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, whom he’d just met at the White House. “The United States has never been closer to potentially have something happen with respect to the Korean Peninsula that can get rid of the nuclear weapons, can create so many good things, so many positive things, and peace and security for the world.”
Associated Press writer Catherine Lucey contributed to this report.