WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump has agreed to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to negotiate an end to Pyongyang's nuclear-weapons program, after months of trading insults and threats of nuclear annihilation, South Korean and U.S. officials said Thursday.
No American president has ever met with a North Korean leader.
The South Korean national security director, Chung Eui-yong, told reporters outside the White House of the planned summit, after briefing Trump and other top U.S. officials about a rare meeting with Kim in the North Korean capital Monday.
Late Thursday, Trump hailed "great progress" on the North Korea issue.
"Kim Jong Un talked about denuclearization with the South Korean Representatives, not just a freeze," Trump wrote on Twitter. "Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time. Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached. Meeting being planned!"
The meeting would be unprecedented during seven decades of animosity between the U.S. and North Korea. The countries do not have formal diplomatic relations. They remain in a state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice and not a peace treaty.
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Chung, who credited Trump's "maximum pressure" economic campaign for the diplomatic opening, said he had told Trump that Kim says he's committed to "denuclearization" and has pledged that North Korea will refrain from any further nuclear or missile tests after a year of escalating tensions. The rival Koreas have already agreed to hold a leadership summit in late April.
"[Kim] expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible," Chung said. "President Trump appreciated the briefing and said he would meet Kim Jong Un by May to achieve permanent denuclearization."
Chung did not say where Trump would meet with Kim. The White House said Trump's meeting with Kim would take place "at a place and time to be determined."
North Korea appeared to confirm the summit plans. A senior North Korean diplomat at the United Nations in New York, Pak Song Il, told The Washington Post in an email that the invitation was the result of Kim's "broad minded and resolute decision" to contribute to the peace and security of the Korean Peninsula.
By the "great courageous decision of our Supreme Leader, we can take the new aspect to secure the peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula and the East Asia region," Pak wrote.
Chung also said Kim understands that routine U.S.-South Korea military drills "must continue." During the Winter Olympics hosted by South Korea in February, the drills were suspended, providing impetus for the inter-Korea rapprochement.
The drills are expected to resume next month. North Korea has long protested the military maneuvers south of the divided Korean Peninsula as a rehearsal for invading the North.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in said a planned summit between Trump and Kim will be a "historical milestone" that will put the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula "really on track."
Moon in a statement read out by his spokesman today also complimented Trump for accepting Kim's invitation for a summit, saying Trump's leadership will be praised "not only by the residents of South and North Korea but every peace-loving person around the world."
The plans for a Trump-Kim meeting got varying responses from lawmakers.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., said the invitation was a sign that sanction pressure was working but he was skeptical of North Korea's motives. He said the Trump administration can "pursue more diplomacy, as we keep applying pressure."
Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said Trump should treat the diplomatic opening "as the beginning of a long diplomatic process" -- avoiding "unscripted" remarks that could derail it.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warned Kim that "the worst possible thing you can do is meet with President Trump in person and try to play him. If you do that, it will be the end of you -- and your regime."
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Trump took office vowing to stop North Korea from attaining a nuclear-tipped missile that could reach the U.S. mainland. He has oscillated between threats and insults directed at Kim and more conciliatory rhetoric.
His more bellicose talk and Kim's nuclear and missile tests have fueled fears of war.
The president, who has ramped up economic sanctions on North Korea to force it to negotiate on giving up its nuclear weapons, has threatened the pariah nation with "fire and fury" if its threats against the U.S. and its allies continued. And he has derided Kim by referring to him as "Little Rocket Man."
After Kim repeated threats against the U.S. in a New Year's address and mentioned the "nuclear button" on his office desk, Trump responded by tweeting that he has a nuclear button, too, "but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"
Chung had said Tuesday after leaving Pyongyang that North Korea was offering talks with the United States on denuclearization and normalizing ties, but the proposal for a summit still came as a surprise.
On Thursday afternoon, Trump made an unexpected visit to the White House press briefing room to alert reporters to the South Korean announcement. When asked whether the announcement would be about talks with North Korea, he told ABC reporter Jon Karl: "It's almost beyond that. Hopefully, you will give me credit."
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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spoke with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe about Trump's decision to meet with Kim before it was publicly announced, Undersecretary of State Steve Goldstein said Thursday. Only hours before, Tillerson had said the U.S. was a "long ways from negotiations" with the North, and the State Department said the U.S. was not going to schedule talks "at this point."
Tillerson is in Ethiopia, where the announcement came in the middle of the night.
Moon had been similarly cautious when discussing the possibility of negotiations with the North, saying, "This is just a start, and we can't be optimistic just yet."
Since taking power in May, Moon has repeatedly called for dialogue with North Korea even as Trump has escalated pressure on the regime.
Kim rattled the region last year with a series of nuclear and long-range missile tests. Then he suddenly responded to Moon's overtures for dialogue in his New Year's Day speech, in which he proposed talks with South Korea, saying he was willing to send athletes to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.
North Korea sent hundreds of athletes, cheerleaders and singers to the games. The two Koreas have also exchanged envoys in recent weeks, including Kim's sister, Kim Yo-Jong, who met Moon in Seoul in February.
South Korea hoped to leverage the nascent inter-Korean detente created during the Olympics to help mediate a dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang and avoid the risk of military conflict on the Korean Peninsula.
Some analysts said Trump risked legitimizing the regime, while others welcomed the potential for a breakthrough.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said it was too much to expect a single Trump-Kim meeting could immediately resolve the nuclear issue that has bedeviled U.S. administrations since the early 1990s, when the North first began producing fissile material for bombs.
"But if the U.S. works closely and intensively with our South Korean allies in its approach to North Korea, a summit offers the potential for starting a serious process that could move us decisively away from the current crisis," Kimball said.
"We need to talk to North Korea," Lewis wrote. "But Kim is not inviting Trump so that he can surrender North Korea's weapons. Kim is inviting Trump to demonstrate that his investment in nuclear and missile capabilities has forced the United States to treat him as an equal."
Trump's decision to meet soon with Kim is supported by Vice President Mike Pence, who set the U.S. tone as the top official at the games in South Korea and sat in on the South Korean envoy's Thursday meeting with Trump, according to an official familiar with the discussions. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. made no concessions in order to pave the way for a meeting with Kim and is not backing off on applying sanctions or maximum pressure.
Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Pennington, Jill Colvin, Zeke Miller, Catherine Lucey, Ken Thomas and Darlene Superville of The Associated Press; by Toluse Olorunnipa, Kanga Kong, Justin Sink, Christopher Anstey and Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News; and by Mark Landler of The New York Times.
A Section on 03/09/2018