Washington
The White House did, however, announce the details of a separate meeting later this month between Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, as the U.S. administration pushed back on a report that Trump is considering the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the allied nation.
Trump and Moon would meet at the White House on May 22 to “continue their close coordination on developments regarding the Korean Peninsula” following last Friday’s meeting between Moon and Kim Jong Un. They will also discuss the U.S. president’s own upcoming summit with the North Korean leader, a statement said.
Earlier this week, Trump expressed a preference for holding the “big event” with Kim in the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, between the two Koreas, where Moon and Kim met. He also said Singapore was in contention to host what will be the first summit of between a U.S. and a North Korean leader.
“We now have a date and we have a location. We’ll be announcing it soon,” Trump told reporters on Friday from the White House South Lawn before departing for Dallas. He’s previously said the summit was planned for May or early June.
A meeting with Kim seemed an outlandish possibility just a few months ago when the two leaders were trading threats and insults over North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons. But momentum for diplomacy has built this year as the rival Koreas have patched up ties. In March, Trump unexpectedly accepted an offer of talks from Kim after the North Korean dictator agreed to suspend nuclear and ballistic missile tests and discuss “denuclearization.”
According to South Korea, Kim has said he’d be willing to give up his nukes if the United States commits to a formal end to the Korean War and pledges not to attack the North. But his exact demands for relinquishing weapons that his nation spent decades building remains unclear.
Trump said that withdrawing U.S. forces from South Korea is “not on the table.” Some 28,500 U.S. forces are based in the allied nation, a military presence that has been preserved to deter North Korea since the war ended in 1953 without a peace treaty.
“Now I have to tell you, at some point into the future, I would like to save the money,” Trump said later as he prepared to board Air Force One. “You know we have 32,000 troops there, but I think a lot of great things will happen, but troops are not on the table. Absolutely.”
At the inter-Korean summit last Friday, held on the southern side of the DMZ, Moon and Kim pledged to rid the peninsula of nuclear weapons and seek a formal end this year to the Korean conflict where the opposing sides remain technically at war more than six decades after fighting halted.