Trump Offers to Meet Kim; North Says Talks Would Be ’Meaningful’

By Staff, Agencies

US President Donald Trump said on Saturday he would like to see North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this weekend at the demilitarized zone [DMZ] between North and South Korea, and North Korea said a meeting would be “meaningful” if it happened.

Trump, currently in Osaka, Japan, for a G20 summit, is due to arrive in South Korea later on Saturday. He is scheduled to return to Washington on Sunday.

If Trump and Kim were to meet, it would be for the third time in just over a year, and four months since their second summit, in Vietnam, broke down with no progress on US efforts to press North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.

Trump made the offer to meet Kim in a comment on Twitter about his trip to South Korea.

“While there, if Chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the Border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello (?)!” he said.

Trump later told reporters his offer to Kim was a spur-of-the-moment idea: “I just thought of it this morning.”

“We’ll be there and I just put out a feeler because I don’t know where he is right now. He may not be in North Korea,” he said.

“If he’s there, we’ll see each other for two minutes, that’s all we can, but that will be fine,” he added. Trump said he and Kim “get along very well”.

Meanwhile, a senior North Korean official said a summit between Trump and Kim in the DMZ would be “meaningful” in advancing relations.

“We see it as a very interesting suggestion, but we have not received an official proposal in this regard,” Choe Son Hui, North Korea’s first vice-minister of Foreign Affairs said in a statement, North Korea’s KCNA state media reported.

“I am of the view that if the DPRK-US summit meetings take place on the division line, as is intended by President Trump, it would serve as another meaningful occasion in further deepening the personal relations between the two leaders and advancing the bilateral relations,” Choe said.

She was referring to North Korea by its official name - the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.