SEOUL, South Korea — Taking an unprecedented step onto North Korean soil, President Donald Trump announced Sunday that Washington and Pyongyang will relaunch stalled nuclear talks. The statement came during an extraordinary last-minute meeting with Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader.
Side-by-side with Kim in the heavily-fortified demilitarized zone, Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to cross the 1953 armistice line separating North and South Korea, then joined Kim for a roughly 50-minute meeting.
It was their third since Trump took office, but none have yet yielded a nuclear deal.
“Stepping across that line was a great honor,” Trump said, later adding that it was “something incredible.”
Trump deemed the meeting a victory, announcing that nuclear talks would resume “within weeks” and that the two countries were designating teams of officials to take the lead.
He even invited Kim, who rarely leaves the country, to visit him at the White House.
Yet for all the fanfare, there were no signs that the U.S. and the North had made any concrete progress on denuclearization, the issue that has led to North Korea’s estrangement from the world.
And veteran nuclear negotiators and North Korea experts immediately questioned whether Trump, by staging a high-profile photo-op absent nuclear concessions, was bestowing legitimacy on Kim and undermining global pressure to force the North to accept a denuclearization deal.
“We can only call it historic if it leads to something,” said Victor Cha, a former Asia director at the White House and an NBC News contributor.
Was Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un at the DMZ more than a photo op?
The meeting capped an unpredictable three days of diplomacy in which Trump, while in nearby Japan for the G-20 summit of world leaders, issued an invitation to Kim on Twitter to meet him in the DMZ.
North Korea reacted positively, calling the proposal “interesting,” but did not confirm that Kim would accept until the last minute.
Even as Trump traveled by helicopter to the DMZ accompanied by a massive security contingent, U.S. officials had told NBC News they were unsure whether Kim would really show up.
And when he did, his handshake with Trump and their ensuing talks unfolded in chaotic fashion under overcast skies. Journalists jostled to capture the historic encounter and even White House officials accompanying the president seemed unsure what would happen next.
“This means that we can feel at ease,” Kim said of the meeting through a translator. “I believe that this will have a positive force on all of our discussions in the future.”
In a nod to the unforeseen nature of their rendezvous in the DMZ, Kim told Trump that he “never expected” to see the president “at this place.”
Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in landed mid-afternoon in the DMZ and rushed to a vista overlooking North Korea. Sean Morrow, commander of the U.N. Security Battalion, briefed Trump about the security situation, gesturing toward North Korean territory.
Minutes later, Trump and Kim were side by side posing for photos and taking a step together over the line into North Korea. They then spoke briefly to reporters inside a nearby room before holding talks that Trump had predicted would last just a few minutes but went on for close to an hour.
Both leaders predicted it would lead to better things to become between their two countries.
Of striking a nuclear deal, Trump said: “We’re not looking for speed, we’re looking to get it right.”
Leaving South Korea after a wonderful meeting with Chairman Kim Jong Un. Stood on the soil of North Korea, an important statement for all, and a great honor!
Trump was already the first U.S. president to meet a North Korean leader while in office, having met with Kim twice before. This marks the first meeting in the no-man’s-land between North and South since the end of the Korean War.
Trump’s last summit with Kim — in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February — collapsed abruptly, with a planned signing ceremony scrapped and Trump explaining to reporters that “sometimes you have to walk.”
At the center of that failure, U.S. officials have said, was Kim’s insistence that all nuclear sanctions be lifted in exchange for only some concessions sought by the U.S. from Pyongyang related to its nuclear program.
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