After their first and only meeting last year, President Trump said he and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “fell in love.” Now they’ve agreed to a second date in hopes of taking the relationship to the next level.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said this afternoon that Trump will meet Kim toward the end of February at a location to be named later.
“The President looks forward to meeting with Chairman Kim,” she said.
The announcement came after Kim Yong Chol, a top North Korean official, arrived in Washington on Thursday night to finalize plans for the summit between his boss and Trump, people familiar with the discussions told me.
Kim met this morning with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — who has taken the lead role in negotiating with North Korea — and reportedly brought a handwritten letter from the North Korean leader for the president.
They then went to the White House for an early afternoon meeting in the Oval Office that lasted about 90 minutes.
Pompeo and Kim Yong Chol then went to lunch to continue discussions.
The second-summit decision is controversial.
The US and North Korea have made very little progress in negotiating an end to Pyongyang’s nuclear program since the two leaders met in Singapore last June — and experts warn this meeting may not break the logjam while giving Kim another opportunity to look like a statesman on the world stage.
Working-level talks between the two sides have stalled, US officials say, and the two sides are basically at an impasse:
America is demanding that North Korea offer a full, detailed list of its nuclear inventory before the US lifts any sanctions on the country, and Pyongyang is demanding the sanctions be lifted before it offers the full list and seriously begins to downgrade its nuclear capabilities.
That means it’s now up to Trump to make headway with Kim, who so far has shown no signs of relenting. In fact, North Korea has actually continued to improve its nuclear and missile programs since the two men met.
But if the summit goes badly — or is canceled before it happens — it’s possible the diplomatic opening created in Singapore could close for good.
At that point, there is a legitimate danger that both countries could revert to threatening each other with nuclear strikes again.
And that would be a much worse situation than the one we have now.