When President Trump last met with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, it took only about 36 hours to arrange a hurried but made-for-TV encounter between the two men on the border between North and South Korea.
More than six years after those talks, Mr. Trump is headed back to South Korea this week, and speculation has flared over whether he and Mr. Kim will meet again. Mr. Trump is scheduled to arrive in the South on Wednesday for bilateral summits with its president, Lee Jae Myung, and the Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific economic summit in the city of Gyeongju.
Mr. Trump, who met Mr. Kim three times in 2018 and 2019, has repeatedly said that he would like to see Mr. Kim again, boasting of their “great relationship.” As he boarded Air Force One on Friday, he said again that he would like to meet Mr. Kim.
“I would,” he told reporters. “If you want to put out the word, I’m open to it.”
In 2019, Mr. Trump was visiting Japan when he tweeted: “If Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!” The two met the next day in Panmunjom, a truce village that lies inside the DMZ, or Demilitarized Zone, that separates the two Koreas.
North Korea has not responded to Mr. Trump’s latest overture. Last month, Mr. Kim said he had “a good memory” of Mr. Trump. But he said North Korea would re-enter negotiations with Washington only if it stopped insisting on his country’s denuclearization.
“Well, I think they are sort of a nuclear power,” Mr. Trump said on Friday.
Mr. Trump is eager to portray himself as a global peacemaker, but it is unclear whether Washington and Pyongyang have an open line of communication. On Friday, Mr. Trump hinted at the difficulty in reaching the North Koreans.
“They have a lot of nuclear weapons but not a lot of telephone service,” he said.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, South Korea had served as an eager mediator, helping arrange the first summit meeting between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump, in Singapore in 2018. When he last met Mr. Kim in Panmunjom in June 2019, Mr. Trump briefly crossed the inter-Korean border line, becoming the first American leader to set foot on North Korean soil. But that meeting also failed to produce a deal on rolling back North Korea’s nuclear program or lifting sanctions imposed on the country.
Relations between the two Koreas have since deteriorated so badly that a top official in the South has said there is little it can do to help facilitate dialogue between Pyongyang and Washington. When Mr. Lee met with Mr. Trump in Washington in August, he called Mr. Trump “the only person that can make progress on this issue.”
Speculation about a possible Trump-Kim meeting gained more currency after a South Korean minister said on Friday that North Korean troops were cleaning their side of Panmunjom. The American-led United Nations Command, which controls the southern half of the village, has decided not to accept any tourists there in the coming days. It said it would not comment on “any hypothetical scenarios.”
South Korean officials said they had not seen logistical moves for a meeting there. But they also would not rule out the possibility, given the peculiar dynamics between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim.
In recent years, Mr. Kim has expanded North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and deepened ties with Russia and China. He now has more leverage than he did in 2019.
“Time is on our side,” Mr. Kim said last month.
Choe Sang-Hun is the lead reporter for The Times in Seoul, covering South and North Korea.
The post With Trump’s Asia Trip, Speculation Mounts of a Meeting With Kim Jong-un appeared first on New York Times.
