WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump said Friday that a date and setting for a historic U.S. summit with North Korea have been determined but did not disclose the details.
"We'll be announcing it soon," Trump told reporters Friday from the White House South Lawn, before leaving for a National Rifle Association speech in Dallas.
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 said Friday that withdrawing U.S. forces from South Korea is "not on the table." About 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.
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"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."
The New York Times reported Thursday that Trump has asked the Pentagon to prepare options for drawing down American troops. It cited unnamed officials as saying that wasn't intended to be a bargaining chip in Trump's talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but did reflect that a prospective peace treaty between the Koreas could diminish the need for U.S. forces in South Korea.
Moon and Trump plan to meet at the White House on May 22 to "continue their close coordination on developments regarding the Korean Peninsula" after an April 27 meeting between Moon and Kim. They also will discuss the U.S. president's own upcoming summit with the North Korean leader, a White House statement said.
Earlier this week, Trump expressed a preference for holding the "big event" with Kim in the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, where Moon and Kim met. He also said Singapore was in contention to host what will be the first summit between a U.S. and a North Korean leader.
Trump disclosed Friday that the time and place for the meeting had been determined. He has previously said the summit was planned for May or early June.
A meeting with Kim seemed an impossibility 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 remain unclear.
At the inter-Korean summit April 27, held on the southern side of the DMZ, Moon and Kim pledged to rid the peninsula of nuclear weapons and to 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 with an armistice.
Kim's demands and intentions remain uncertain, meaning contemplation by Trump to remove the troops could prove quixotic. Two weeks ago, shortly before the inter-Korean summit, Moon said Kim actually wasn't insisting on its long-standing demand for the withdrawal of U.S. troops as a precondition for abandoning the nuclear program.
National security adviser John Bolton, who met with his South Korean counterpart Chung Eui-yong in Washington on Friday, called the Thursday Times report "utter nonsense."
During his presidential campaign, Trump complained that South Korea does not do enough to financially support the American military commitment. In March, Washington and Seoul began negotiations on how much South Korea should offset the costs of the deployment in the coming years. Under the current agreement that expires at the end of 2018, the South provides about $830 million per year.
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Before Trump meets Kim, Washington is looking for North Korea to address another persistent source of tension between the adversaries: the detention of three Korean-Americans accused of anti-state of activities in the North.
Trump hinted Friday that the release of Kim Dong Chul, Kim Hak Song and Tony Kim was in the offing but again was sparing on the details.
"We're having very substantive talks with North Korea and a lot of things have already happened with respect to the hostages, and I think you're going to see very good things. As I said yesterday, stay tuned," Trump said, referring to an earlier tweet.
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The news that Trump was looking at options to pull U.S. forces stationed in South Korea was surprising there and in Japan, where many people are skeptical about Kim's reported vow to negotiate away his nuclear weapons.
The U.S. forces stationed in South Korea have been the bedrock of the 65-year-old alliance between Seoul and Washington. They are primarily intended to serve as a bulwark against North Korean aggression and to preserve a shaky peace that allowed South Korea to build its economy into a global powerhouse.
"For South Korea, living with a nuclear-armed North Korea is much better than living without American troops," said Shin Won-sik, a retired three-star South Korean general. "If they are gone, we will lose proof that the Americans will defend us. We will lose confidence that if war breaks out, we can win."
Moon moved quickly Friday to calm jitters about a U.S. troop reduction, especially among older conservatives who consider the U.S. military's presence a sacrosanct symbol of national security and are deeply dubious of Kim's intentions. Moon's office said news that the White House was considering drawing down troops was "not true at all."
"The Moon government doesn't want the focus of public attention to move from the denuclearization of North Korea to the withdrawal of U.S. troops yet, which is such a political hot potato," said Lee Byong-chul, senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Cooperation in Seoul. "But if a peace treaty is signed, the U.S. troops are bound to peter out. Much of the reason they are staying here will be gone."
South Korean conservatives argue that a withdrawal would expose their country to potential foes far stronger than North Korea, such as China and Japan, which have invaded numerous times over the centuries. South Koreans reacted to Washington's past efforts to pull out troops with calls for arming the country with nuclear weapons of its own.
Although South Korea's navy and air force are superior to the North's, North Korea has a much bigger army, including stockpiles of chemical and nuclear weapons and huge batteries of artillery, rockets and missiles that could hit Seoul, a city of 10 million people.
For decades, the U.S. military has protected South Korea and Japan under its nuclear umbrella, and it shares high-tech military surveillance and conducts annual joint war games preparing for any conflict.
For many in the region, giving up that protection is an unsettling prospect, even if peace comes to the peninsula.
"The reason foreign investors stay in South Korea, and its stock market doesn't panic even when China's military prowess grows and North Korea conducts its nuclear weapons, is because of the U.S. military presence here," said Shin, who was the South Korean military's top operational strategist before he retired in 2015.
"If they shake the alliance for the sake of denuclearizing North Korea," he added, "we will have an economic crisis before a security crisis."
Information for this article was contributed by by Choe Sang-Hun and Motoko Rich of The New York Times and by Matthew Pennington, Zeke Miller and Ken Thomas of The Associated Press.
A Section on 05/05/2018