PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP says a deal with North Korea, “if completed,” will be very good for the world.
Trump appears to be referring to North Korea agreeing to give up its nuclear weapons arsenal. That has been a key demand of the United States and other world powers.
The president has agreed to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for a historic face-to-face summit.
South Korean officials who recently met with Kim told their White House counterparts Thursday that Kim was eager to meet with Trump.
Trump tweeted his delight at the plans last night:
The tweet came after the White House tried to swat away criticism that the US is getting nothing in exchange for the meeting.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said North Korea has made promises to denuclearise, stop its nuclear and missile testing and allow joint US-South Korean military exercises.
But questions remained over exactly what North Korea means by “denuclearise” and what the US might be risking with a highly publicised summit that will build up Kim’s stature among world leaders.
“Let’s not forget that the North Koreans did promise something,” Sanders said, responding to a reporter’s question about why Trump agreed to a meeting — unprecedented between leaders of the two nations — without preconditions.
She added:
We are not going to have this meeting take place until we see concrete actions that match the words and the rhetoric of North Korea.
Still, the White House indicated that planning for the meeting was fully on track.
The previous night’s announcement of the summit marked a dramatic turnaround after a year of escalating tensions and rude insults between the two leaders.
A personal meeting would have been all but unthinkable when Trump was being dismissed as a “senile dotard” and the Korean “rocket man” was snapping off weapons tests in his quest for a nuclear arsenal that could threaten the US mainland.
North Korea’s capabilities are indeed close to posing a direct atomic threat to the U.S. And the wider world has grown fearful of a resumption of the Korean War that ended in 1953 without a peace treaty.
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