“I will be in South Korea – I’ll let him know,” Trump told reporters in Osaka, Japan, after a tweet Saturday morning in which he invited Kim for a handshake. “We’ll see. If he’s there we’ll see each other for two minutes. That’s all we can, but that will be fine.”
If the meeting happened, it would be the third between the two leaders since they began easing long-standing tensions that risked sparking a military conflict. A summit in Vietnam earlier this year collapsed without a deal, and discussions have gone nowhere since.
Trump is scheduled to visit Seoul on Saturday for an overnight stay and meetings with President Moon Jae-in. North Korea’s state media reported a week ago that Kim had received a letter from Trump with “excellent content,” without providing more details. A Trump-Kim encounter on Sunday hasn’t been confirmed, Ko Min-jung, a spokeswoman for South Korea’s presidential office, said by text message.
“Certainly, we seem to get along very well,” Trump said of Kim during the start of a breakfast meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the Group of 20 summit. “For the stupid people that say, ‘Oh he gets along,’ no, it’s good to get along. It’s good to get along. Because frankly if I didn’t become president you’d be right now in a war with North Korea.”
Trump said he thought of sending the tweet inviting Kim to meet him at the border this morning.
“I just put out a feeler because I don’t know where he is right now,” the president said. “He may not be in North Korea, but I said if Chairman Kim would want to meet, I’ll be at the border.”
Dividing lines
Trump’s trip to South Korea on Saturday and Sunday risks highlighting the distance between him and Kim, more than a year after their historic first meeting in Singapore. Despite the warm words, they’re still far apart on any plan to reduce or eliminate Kim’s nuclear arsenal.
Officials in the US and in South Korea were caught off guard by Trump’s tweet. One South Korean official described the government there as shocked and scrambling to adjust. A US official said there had been no planning for Trump to meet Kim at the border.
Victor Cha, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said he expects South Korea’s government will now work on getting Kim to show up and meet Trump.
“But there’s nothing really to be gained from it except for a photo op,” he said in an interview. “There’s no real progress on denuclearisation. The more meetings you do like this without any progress, the more you are legitimising him as a leader and an acceptable nuclear weapons state.”
‘Like a parrot’
The two leaders remain locked in a pattern of personal praise and diplomatic standoff, unable or unwilling to start negotiating the next steps forward. Even before Trump arrived in the region Thursday, North Korea’s foreign ministry complained in a statement that “the US repeatedly talks about resumption of dialogue like a parrot without considering any realistic proposal.”
After a year of talks, the US hasn’t got North Korea to agree to a definition of “denuclearisation,” let alone a timeline to carry it out. Kim’s still buried under US sanctions, unable to develop the beachfront resorts where Trump once mused about building “the best hotels in the world.”
Although a return to nuclear tests and threats of “fire and fury” seem unlikely for now, North Korea has reaffirmed Kim’s warning that he would only wait until the end of the year for the US to make a better offer. In May, he sent Trump a pointed message about the potential for renewed tensions, test-launching ballistic missiles for the first time since November 2017.
The US has insisted North Korea must fully abandon its nuclear arsenal and means of producing weapons before sanctions are relieved. Trump walked out of the Hanoi summit after Kim demanded sanctions relief in exchange for dismantling only the country’s main nuclear facility at Yongbyon, according to the president.