Trump-Kim summit set June 12 in Singapore
WASHINGTON (AP) — Envisioning “a very special moment for world peace,” US President Donald Trump announced on Thursday he will meet North Korea’s Kim Jong-un for highly anticipated summit talks in Singapore on June 12.
He set the stage for his announcement by hosting a 3 a.m., made-for-TV welcome home for three Americans held by Kim’s government.
”We welcomed them back home the proper way,” Trump told supporters at a campaign rally in Indiana on Thursday evening.
Final details in place, Trump and Kim agreed to the first face-to-face North Korea-US summit since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.
It’s the most consequential and perhaps riskiest foreign policy effort so far in Trump’s presidency as North Korea’s nuclear program approaches a treacherous milestone — the capacity to strike the continental US with a thermonuclear warhead.
Trump says the US is aiming for “denuclearization” of the entire Korean peninsula, but he has yet to fill in just what steps that might include and what the timing would be.
”We’re starting off on a new footing,” Trump said of himself and Kim as he welcomed the detainees in a floodlit ceremony at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington. He hailed their release as a potential breakthrough in relations between the longtime adversary nations.
He and Kim “will both try to make it a very special moment for World Peace!” he said of the summit later on Twitter.
He told his rally crowd, “I think it’s going to be a very big success.”
Kim has suspended nuclear and missile tests and put his nuclear program up for negotiation, but questions remain about how serious his offer is and what disarmament steps he would be willing to take.
The White House has said the withdrawal of thousands of US troops from South Korea is “not on the table.”
As for the venue, why Singapore?
White House spokesman Raj Shah said the country has relationships with both the US and North Korea, meaning both presidents’ security — and a sense of neutrality — can be assured.
Located at the southern tip of Malaysia, the prosperous city state is a regional Southeast Asia hub whose free enterprise philosophy welcomes trading partners from everywhere. It has close diplomatic and military ties with the US and yet is also familiar ground for North Korea, with which it established diplomatic relations in 1975.
”Since their independence, they’ve very deliberately developed a reputation as an honest broker between East and West,” said David Adelman, the former US ambassador.
The White House choreographed the arrival event at the air base, the image-conscious president telling reporters, “I think you probably broke the all-time-in-history television rating for 3 o’clock in the morning.”
The public display stood in stark contrast to the low-key, private reception that the State Department had envisioned, in keeping with a practice of trying to protect potentially traumatized victims from being thrust into the spotlight so soon after an ordeal.