Trump offers North Korea's Kim weekend meeting in demilitarized zone

OSAKA/SEOUL (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump proposed a weekend meeting with Kim Jong Un at the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea on Saturday, an encounter North Korea said would be meaningful in advancing relations if it goes ahead.

If Trump and Kim do meet, it will be for the third time in just over a year, and four months since their second summit broke down with no progress on U.S. efforts to press North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.

North Korea said a weekend meeting between Kim and Trump, who is scheduled to return to Washington on Sunday, would be “meaningful”, although it had not had an official proposal.

Trump made the offer to meet Kim in a comment on Twitter about his trip to South Korea, where he landed on Saturday after wrapping up the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan.

“While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!” Trump said, later telling reporters his offer was a spur-of-the-moment idea: “I just thought of it this morning.”

“If he’s there, we’ll see each other for two minutes, that’s all we can, but that will be fine,” he said, adding he and Kim “get along very well”.

About five hours after Trump’s offer, a senior North Korean official said a summit between Trump and Kim in the DMZ would be “meaningful” in advancing relations.

“We see it as a very interesting suggestion, but we have not received an official proposal,” Choe Son Hui, North Korea’s first vice-minister of foreign affairs said in a statement, state news agency KCNA said.

“If the DPRK-U.S. summit meetings take place on the division line, as is intended by President Trump, it would serve as another meaningful occasion in further deepening the personal relations between the two leaders and advancing the bilateral relations,” Choe said.

She was referring to North Korea by its official name - the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Later, Trump told a news conference, “We may be meeting with Chairman Kim ... Kim Jong Un was very receptive.”

He added, “We won’t call it a summit. We’ll call it a handshake,” and said he would be very comfortable stepping over the border into North Korea if he met Kim at the DMZ.

“We’re working things out right now,” Trump said after his arrival in Seoul, when asked whether there will be a three-way meeting with Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Sunday. “We’re going to see.”

STALLED TALKS
U.S. special envoy Stephen Biegun said on Friday the United States was ready to hold constructive talks with North Korea to follow through on a denuclearization agreement they reached last year, South Korea’s foreign ministry said.

Biegun told his South Korean counterpart, Lee Do-hoon, that Washington wanted to make “simultaneous, parallel” progress on the agreement reached at a summit between Trump and Kim in Singapore in June last year, the ministry said in a statement.

Both sides had agreed to establish new relations and work toward denuclearization of the Korean peninsula but talks stalled in February as the two sides failed to narrow differences between U.S. calls for denuclearization and North Korean demands for sanctions relief.

South Korea’s presidential office said nothing was confirmed with regards to a Trump, Kim meeting.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told Moon at the G20 summit that Kim had told him in April security guarantees were key, and that corresponding measures were needed to realize denuclearization, South Korea’s presidential office said.

Meeting Trump in Osaka, Chinese President Xi Jinping said he hopes the United States and North Korea can show flexibility, resume talks as soon as possible, and find a way to resolve each other’s concerns, China’s Foreign Ministry said.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY
Trump, who said before departing for the G20 summit that he did not expect to meet Kim on this trip, wanted to visit the DMZ on a 2017 visit to South Korea but bad weather prevented it.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this week that a recent exchange of letters between Trump and Kim boosted hopes for a restart of talks, calling it a “very real possibility”.

Trump told reporters on Saturday that Kim had sent him a birthday card and Trump sent him a letter in return.

North Korea’s official KCNA news agency said Trump’s letter had “excellent content” and Kim would “seriously contemplate” it, without elaborating.

Trump has previously said publicly he had received a very warm “beautiful letter” from Kim. He has not divulged its contents, but a White House official, who did not want to be identified, described it as “very flowery”.

“President Trump made his pitch for a short summit with Chairman Kim on Twitter as White House officials most likely have tried - and failed - to set up such a meeting through official diplomatic or South Korean channels,” said Harry J. Kazianis of the Center for the National Interest.

“While no major agreements will be signed, both sides can reaffirm their commitment to dialogue and diplomacy, essentially resetting the table for a future deal,” Kazianis said.

Others were more skeptical.

“The fundamental problem - no working-level meetings and no basic change in at least the US negotiating position - means that any meeting right now is just pointless theater,” Vipin Narang, an MIT professor of political science, said on Twitter.