Since returning to the White House, President Trump has expressed interest in re-engaging with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, saying the two men had forged a friendship when they met several times during his first term.
His offer met with a stony silence until Tuesday, when North Korean state media quoted Kim Yo-jong, Mr. Kim’s sister and spokeswoman, who seemed to sound a positive note about the relationship.
“I do not want to deny the fact that the personal relationship between the head of our state and the present U.S. president is not bad,” Ms. Kim said.
While her comment appeared to leave the door ajar for a resumption of talks, Ms. Kim made clear that the country would not join any negotiations about dismantling its nuclear arsenal.
Any effort to leverage personal relations to deny North Korea status as a nuclear power “will be thoroughly rejected,” she said in the statement, which was carried by the official Korean Central News Agency. (Earlier this year, Mr. Trump told reporters that Mr. Kim was “a nuclear power,” although Washington has long refused to accept North Korea as such and still insists on eliminating its nuclear weapons program.)
Much has changed since Mr. Trump’s first term, when he met Mr. Kim three times. Those historic talks put the reclusive North Korean leader on the global stage. But the talks ultimately fizzled out in an embarrassing failure for Mr. Kim, who returned home without the lifting of sanctions that he badly needed to improve the lives of his long-suffering people.
Since then, North Korea has doubled down on expanding its nuclear arsenal and continued its criticism of the United States, although it has refrained from personal attacks on Mr. Trump.
Washington’s growing tensions with Beijing and Moscow have helped North Korea too, as both China and Russia have vetoed any U.S.-led attempt to place new sanctions on the North. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Kim has strengthened ties with President Vladimir V. Putin by supplying North Korean troops and weapons to aid Mr. Putin’s war efforts. Last year, Russia and North Korea signed an alliance treaty.
All this gives Mr. Kim more leverage than he had during his first round of negotiations with Mr. Trump.
“It is worth taking into account the fact that the year 2025 is neither 2018 nor 2019,” Ms. Kim said on Tuesday, adding that the North’s “capabilities and geopolitical environment have radically changed.”
But she did not rule out negotiations with Washington completely, so long as the United States accepted the North as a nuclear power and sought to improve ties on that basis.
Analysts said that if diplomacy with Mr. Trump resumed, Mr. Kim is likely to steer discussions away from a full denuclearization. He would instead propose to give up only part of his nuclear weapons program in return for concessions from Washington, such as the lifting of sanctions, they said.
Ms. Kim on Monday issued another statement in which North Korea spurned a proposal for dialogue from Lee Jae Myung, the new president of South Korea.
The first summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim was held in Singapore in 2018. It produced a broadly worded agreement in which they said they would build “new” relations between their nations and “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
Mr. Trump hailed the meeting as a great success, claiming that there was no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea. He also said he “fell in love” with Mr. Kim and exchanged “beautiful letters” with him.
But their second summit, in 2019, ended without an agreement, and their third and final meeting later that year, on the inter-Korean border, was largely symbolic. Mr. Trump briefly stepped across the border line onto North Korean soil.
“I was proud to become the first sitting President to cross this Demilitarized Zone into North Korea,” Mr. Trump said on Monday in a statement commemorating the 72nd anniversary of the armistice that halted the 1950-53 Korean War.
But he also reaffirmed the United States’ alliance with South Korea.
“Although the evils of communism still persist in Asia, American and South Korean forces remain united in an ironclad alliance to this day,” Mr. Trump said.
Choe Sang-Hun is the lead reporter for The Times in Seoul, covering South and North Korea.
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