President Trump’s attempts to rekindle a relationship with Kim Jong-un have hit a rocky patch as North Korean diplomats refused to accept his letter, according to a report.
Trump was said to have written the letter to the North Korean despot with the goal of restoring their communication from his first term in office, when the president claimed the two leaders “fell in love”.
Despite multiple attempts by the White House to deliver Trump’s letter in person, however, North Korean envoys at the UN headquarters in New York have refused to accept it, the website NK News reported.
Trump claimed in April the US was in “communication” with Pyongyang, adding that his new administration would “probably do something at some point”. North Korea is seen as one of America’s most dangerous adversaries.
Trump derided Kim as “little rocket man” and threatened him with “fire and fury” early in his first term as the US sought to rein in Pyongyang’s growing nuclear weapons programme. After an exchange of letters between the two men, however, those threats gave way to a remarkable détente in 2018.
Trump and Kim met three times in the space of a year, culminating in a summit at the border between North and South Korea in June 2019. Trump became the first sitting US president to cross into North Korea, taking 20 steps inside the reclusive country to shake Kim’s hand. “He wrote me beautiful letters. They were great letters, and then we fell in love,” Trump said at the time.
The pair crossing the Korean border to shake Kim’s hand in 2019
GETTY IMAGES
Despite the president’s high-stakes diplomacy, however, the US failed to reach a deal that would force North Korea to freeze or abandon its nuclear weapons programme in exchange for sanctions relief.
Since Trump left office in 2021, Pyongyang has continued testing ballistic missiles capable of striking the US mainland and forged closer military ties with other American adversaries, including Russia. Kim has sent thousands of North Korean troops to support Russian forces in Ukraine, as well as missiles and ammunition.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the NK News report. Experts suggested that Kim had less incentive to seek a rapprochement with Washington than he did in 2018. North Korea’s ailing economy is propped up by China, and Kim visited Russia to strike a deal with President Putin in 2023, securing economic aid from Moscow in return for military support.
Kim has cosied up to President Putin of Russia and ramped up his country’s nuclear weapons programme, below
AP
“Kim Jong-un needs Trump much less than was the case in 2018 or 2019,” Andrei Lankov, a director at Korea Risk Group and professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, told NK News. “I still think North Koreans are interested in talking and making a deal, but this deal will be less attractive to the US than the deal discussed and rejected by President Trump in 2019.”
Peter Ward, an expert on the North Korean economy at the Sejong Institute, suggested Trump’s open discussion of his correspondence with Kim in the past might make Pyongyang wary of accepting the president’s latest letter. Trump showed his classified letters from Kim to the veteran journalist Bob Woodward, admitting the material was top secret.
“Don’t say I gave them to you, OK? … Those are so top secret,” Trump told Woodward during an interview in December 2019, according to the journalist’s audiobook The Trump Tapes.
“Last time around, the White House was very candid to put it mildly,” Ward said. “They released a lot of info, including the letters themselves, and Trump freely talked to journalists about his interactions with Kim. The North Koreans might be reluctant to leave a paper trail this time.”