Washington
The news came after Trump met for about 90 minutes in the Oval Office with Kim Yong Chol, a former spy chief who has served as Pyongyang’s lead negotiator. White House aides disclosed no other logistics, but one location that has been strongly considered is Danang, Vietnam, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
“We’ve continued to make progress,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters after the meeting. She emphasized that the administration would “keep pressure and sanctions on North Korea until we see fully and verified denuclearization.”
The announcement reaffirmed Trump’s commitment to a strategy in which he has placed faith in his own negotiating skills to cut through years of mistrust and dead-end talks among lower-level diplomats and forge a deal for North Korea to relinquish a nuclear weapons program that analysts said can now reliably strike the United States.
Yet nuclear experts have said there has been no demonstrable progress since the first summit in Singapore last June, and Trump’s claims that North Korea is a diminished threat have been contradicted by the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.
“While a possible new avenue to peace now exists with North Korea, it continues to pose an extraordinary threat and the United States must remain vigilant,” the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Review, made public this week, concluded.
In recent months, the talks have stalled as North Korea refused demands from U.S. negotiators to provide a detailed inventory of its nuclear and missile programs. Kim Jong Un has made clear he objects because doing so would be tantamount to providing a list of U.S. targets.
Instead, Pyongyang has insisted that the United States lift economic sanctions on North Korea and offer a security guarantee to the isolated regime before it makes any further concessions.
With little progress on the technical end of the negotiations among diplomats, the fate of the talks could rely on Trump changing the current trajectory in direct interactions with senior North Korean officials.
A second summit “is not necessarily great news,” Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, warned on Twitter. He said Trump must insist on a “detailed roadmap” and added that the outcome “depends on how well a summit is prepared and handled and what @realDonaldTrump offers and demands in return. Recent history hardly reassuring.”
For Trump, a second summit could help him make the case that his top foreign policy initiative is paying off and divert attention from his escalating domestic political troubles.
The president is embroiled in an increasingly nasty public fight with congressional Democrats as a partial government shutdown over funding for his proposed border wall reached the four-week mark on Friday. And the White House has been rocked by a series of new revelations in the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Friday marked the second time Trump has welcomed Kim Yong Chol, who was reported to be delivering a letter from Pyongyang. He also visited Trump in the Oval Office last June to seal plans for the leaders’ summit later that month in Singapore — the first time a sitting U.S. president has met a North Korean ruler.
Unlike the first visit, however, during which a smiling Trump was photographed accepting an oversized envelope from Kim, reporters were not permitted to view any portion of their meeting in the Oval.
Before arriving at the White House, Kim met for less than an hour with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a hotel in, D.C.’s Dupont Circle neighborhood. The two parties met for lunch there after Kim returned from the White House.