Trump puts North Korea summit back on for June 12
U.S. President Donald Trump walks with Kim Yong-chol, left, former North Korean military intelligence chief and one of leader Kim Jong Un’s closest aides, outside the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on June 1. / UPI-Yonhap
U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday put a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un back on for June 12 following weeks of uncertainty over whether it would take place.
Trump said after meeting with a senior North Korean official at the White House that the summit will go ahead in Singapore to discuss the dismantlement of the North’s nuclear weapons program.
“We’ll be meeting on June 12th in Singapore,” Trump told reporters on the White House grounds after seeing off Kim Yong-chol, a close aide to the North Korean leader. “And I think it’ll be a process. I never said it goes in one meeting. I think it’s going to be a process. But the relationships are building, and that’s a very positive thing.”
The two sides have been at odds over how far North Korea will go to dismantle its nuclear weapons program and what security guarantees the regime would receive in return.
The U.S. wants to see the North quickly and “irreversibly” dismantle the program before providing significant concessions, but the North has rejected “unilateral” abandonment.
“I think they want to do that. I know they want to do that,” Trump said when asked if North Korea would denuclearize in one go. “They want other things along the line. They want to develop as a country. That’s going to happen, I have no doubt.”
Still, he refused to say whether the North agreed to the U.S. demand for complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization.
“We talked about a lot of things. We really did,” he said. “But the big deal will be on June 12th. And again it’s a process … we’re not going to go in and sign something on June 12th, and we never were. We’re going to start a process.”
The U.S. president said he told the North Korean delegation that they could take their time.
“We can go fast. We can go slowly. But I think they’d like to see something happen. And if we can work that out, that will be good,” he said.
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| From left, former North Korean military intelligence chief Kim Yong-chol, President Donald Trump, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, right, walk from the Oval Office, Friday, in Washington. / AP-Yonhap |
Kim Yong-chol, the top North Korean to enter the White House in nearly two decades, traveled from New York following two days of meetings with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on a possible summit between their leaders.
Pompeo said after the meetings that “real progress” was made toward “setting the conditions” for a summit, but he also said there remains “a great deal of work to do.”
The U.S. president said the North Korean official handed him a “very nice” and “very interesting” letter from Kim, but later added that he hadn’t opened it.
“I didn’t open it in front of the director,” Trump said. “I said, ‘Would you want me to open it?’ He said, ‘You can read it later.’ I may be in for a big surprise, folks.”
Trump called off the summit in an open letter to Kim last week, citing “open hostility” from the regime. Following a conciliatory statement from the North, he put the summit back on track, and officials from both sides have been continuing meetings on the inter-Korean border as well as in Singapore to hammer out the substantive and logistical details.
On Friday Trump said he doesn’t want to use the term “maximum pressure” anymore, a term his administration has coined to describe its sanctions campaign against Pyongyang.
There were “hundreds of new sanctions ready to go on,” he said, but they won’t be imposed “until such time as the talks break down.” Trump added that he looks forward to the day the sanctions can be lifted.
His words mark a turnaround from last year when he engaged in a war of words with Kim over the regime’s testing of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Fears of war escalated as Trump threatened to “totally destroy” the regime and the North responded with a threat to detonate a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean.
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| President Donald Trump, center, accompanied by former North Korean military intelligence chief Kim Yong-chol, left, greets Kim Song Hye, Head of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea of the Korean Workers’ Party outside the Oval Office, Friday, in Washington. / AP-Yonhap |