NEW YORK/ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE--U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday played down the chances of a quick breakthrough in getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear arms as a delegation from Pyongyang headed to meet him, carrying a letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un which suggested a proposed summit may be back on.
In a brief interview with Reuters aboard Air Force One on the way to Texas, Trump said he was still hoping for an unprecedented meeting with Kim on June 12 in Singapore to push for North Korean "denuclearization."
"I’d like to see it done in one meeting," he said. "But often times that’s not the way deals work. There’s a very good chance that it won’t be done in one meeting or two meetings or three meetings. But it’ll get done at some point."
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said a North Korean delegation, headed by high-ranking official Kim Yong Chol, would make a rare visit the White House on Friday and give Trump a letter from Kim. The letter appeared to be in response to a comment from Trump last Thursday when he canceled the summit, accusing Pyongyang of hostility, but urged the North Korean leader to "call me or write" if he had a change of heart.
Kim's letter seemed to be a sign that the summit might now go ahead. There has been a flurry of diplomatic efforts in the past few days to get the summit back on track.
North Korea, whose nuclear ambitions have been a source of tension for decades, has made advances in missile technology in recent years but Trump has sworn not to allow it to develop nuclear missiles that could hit the United States. He wants North Korea to "denuclearize," meaning to get rid of its nuclear arms, in return for relief from economic sanctions but the leadership in Pyongyang is believed to regard nuclear weapons as crucial to its survival and has rejected unilaterally disarming.
The North Korean visit to the White House would be the first there by a high-level official from the secretive state since 2000 when senior figure Jo Myong Rok met President Bill Clinton.
'While Trump has put great importance on sealing a nuclear deal with North Korea, he has bucked traditional U.S. foreign policy by alienating America's European and NATO allies. He snubbed France, Germany and Britain by pulling out of a nuclear agreement with Iran and upset the Europeans, as well as neighbours Canada and Mexico, with protectionist trade policies meant to safeguard U.S. jobs.
Trump and autocratic North Korean leader Kim traded insults and threats of war last year but in March the bellicose rhetoric gave way to a proposal for a historic summit. “It does no good if we are in a place where we don’t think there is real opportunity to place them together,” Pompeo said at a news conference on Thursday after two days of talks with Kim Yong Chol in New York. "We have made real progress toward that in the last 72 hours."
