BBC Photo: US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader last met in 2019
Source: BBC News (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn09gg8v721o)
DST News: Former US President Donald Trump has expressed willingness to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his forthcoming visit to Asia.
“I would. If you want to put out the word, I’m open to it,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One before departing, noting that he still maintained “a great relationship” with Kim.
During his first term, Trump made history as the first sitting US president to step into North Korea, where he and Kim last met in 2019.
The former president’s itinerary includes stops in Malaysia and Japan, with meetings scheduled with several world leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping, amid ongoing trade tensions following Trump’s imposition of sweeping tariffs earlier this year.
Trump’s approach to North Korea—an isolated communist regime pursuing nuclear weapons—has been unconventional. After initially mocking Kim as a “little rocket man,” he later held three summits with the North Korean leader, though the talks failed to yield a denuclearisation agreement. Since then, Pyongyang has carried out multiple intercontinental missile tests.
Asked whether he recognised North Korea as a nuclear power, Trump said on Thursday, “I think they are sort of a nuclear power… They got a lot of nuclear weapons, I’ll say that.”
Kim, for his part, has said he is open to another meeting if Washington drops what he called its “absurd” demand for North Korea’s complete nuclear disarmament. “I still have a good memory of President Trump,” Kim was quoted as saying by state media last month.
South Korea’s Unification Minister Chung Dong-young told AFP there was a “considerable” possibility the two leaders could meet while Trump attends the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum in South Korea. However, a senior US official told Anadolu Agency that no meeting with Kim was on Trump’s official schedule—though their last encounter at the Demilitarised Zone in 2019 was arranged through a spontaneous social media invitation.
Trump will first attend the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) summit in Malaysia before flying to Busan, South Korea, on Wednesday for the Apec summit. There, he is expected to meet South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, who has previously discussed the prospect of a Trump–Kim meeting and a potential freeze on North Korea’s nuclear production.
Trump’s planned meeting with China’s President Xi comes against the backdrop of renewed trade tensions. Although both sides had agreed to pause planned triple-digit tariffs, the truce may falter after Trump announced a possible 100% levy on Chinese goods in response to Beijing’s restrictions on rare earth exports—materials vital to global electronics production, of which China refines about 90%.
