Trump agrees to meet North Korea’s Kim

The situation has escalated dramatically since Trump entered office, with the Republican trading war threats with Kim as North Korea tested missiles it said were capable of striking anywhere in the United States.

Here’s what we know – and don’t know. “Each time they’ve cheated and kept on going”.

The United States and North Korea fought on opposite sides of a war in the 1950s, and in the last two decades have been engaged in perhaps the world’s most unsafe nuclear standoff, with 30,000 USA military personnel stationed just over the border in the South.

There’s no word on who will attend the meeting, other than the two leaders.

Evans Revere, a former senior State Department official experienced in negotiating with North Korea, warned there is a disconnect between how the North and the US describes “denuclearization” of the divided Korean Peninsula.

Q: What does North Korea want? Who should the North Koreans listen to?

Chung had recently returned from Pyongyang, where he met Kim personally. National Security Advisor Chung read from a prepared statement, underscoring South Korea’s optimism that a peaceful solution and permanent denuclearization of the Korean peninsula can be reached.

Trump, a reality star turned convention busting President, has dubbed Kim “Little Rocket Man” and threatened to rain fire and fury over North Korea, raising fears of a devastating war across the world’s last Cold War frontier.

Even if the meeting doesn’t materialize, Pyongyang could still claim some credit and blame the United States for thwarting efforts for peace. They discussed topics from missiles and terrorism to human rights. “He does the easy things, and if he can get him at Mar-A-Lago, even better”.

Trump had previously said he was willing to meet Kim under the right circumstances but had indicated the time was not right for such talks.

In the first months of his presidency, Donald Trump played the Chinese paper to push North Korea and approached the Japanese Prime Minister, Sino Ampe, giving the impression that South Korea’s President Mou Jie-in was on the sidelines.

“So that achieves North Korea’s first objective, even if there’s no progress at all in terms of what they discuss at the summit”, Zhao said.

Kim, a portly 30-something whose state media recently blasted Trump as a “lunatic mean old trickster and human reject” presides over a prison state, purges his foes and has vowed to obliterate the USA in a nuclear cloud. Is it North Korea or is it China that is putting denuclearization on the table?

What do the South Koreans think?

Scarborough believes the meeting will actually take place, but he has no confidence in the president’s ability to reach any sort of agreement with North Korea on its nuclear program or any other issue of substance.

On Tuesday after leaving Pyongyang, Chung had publicized that North Korea was offering talks with the United States on denuclearization and normalizing ties. “We facilitated important meetings, including between Japan and NK”.

“Kim isn’t inviting Trump to relinquish his nuclear weapons”.

Trump and Kim are completely different, but at the same time paradoxically resemble. Marco Rubio said Friday.

He declined to say whether there had been direct communication between Beijing and Washington since Trump agreed to the summit, saying only that communication channels were open and smooth.

Experts have low expectations for the outcome of the meeting, if indeed it goes ahead.

“We’re in very close contact, we have come certainly a long way”, he said earlier this week.

The sanctions were part of an effort to pressure the North Korean government into negotiating an end to its development of nuclear weapons.

But how excited should we really get about the prospects of a diplomatic breakthrough with Pyongyang?

Kim and Trump had engaged in an increasingly bellicose exchange of insults over the North’s nuclear and missile programmes, which it pursues in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions, before an easing of tension coinciding with last month’s Winter Olympics in the South.

The South Koreans have demonstrated that it’s possible to negotiate with the North and come to a mutual understanding.