North Korea Hails ’New Era’ of Relations with the US
Local Editor
While American and North Korean officials met in Singapore to narrow differences between the two countries, US President Donald Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un are getting prepared for their historic summit in the city state on Tuesday.
Relatively, as North Korea spoke of establishing a new "permanent peace-keeping mechanism" and its state-run news agency hailed a "new era" in relations with the US, Trump tweeted on Monday about how pleased he was to be in Singapore.
"Excitement in the air!" Trump tweeted.
Meanwhile, the format for the historic talks, at a luxury island hotel, was still far from clear. A US official said that the first session of the Tuesday morning talks would be between two leaders alone with translators but no advisors and aides.
Trump and Kim would enter the negotiating room only after that first one-on-one session was over. The official said it was unclear how long that first session would last.
In further details, it was reported that Kim planned to fly back to North Korea in the early afternoon on Thursday, leaving very little time for actual negotiations, although there is still considerable uncertainty about what a deal between the leaders would look like.
Pyongyang envisages denuclearization as a gradual and somewhat amorphous process, in which both sides take phased reciprocal steps to defuse tensions with the ultimate, but distant goal of nuclear disarmament.
The Trump administration previously insisted on "complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament" [CVID] of North Korea, with the emphasis on unilateral steps by Pyongyang rewarded by US security assurances.
But Trump significantly softened the US negotiating stance in the immediate run-up to the summit, accepting the prospect of an open-ended negotiations involving multiple future summits.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team
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