U.S. President Donald Trump has been trying to revive dialogue with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
North Korea has denied communication with U.S. President Donald Trump, despite the President saying he plans to meet with leader Kim Jong Un later this year.
Kim Yo Jong, Mr. Kim’s sister and close adviser, said Wednesday there had not been any recent communication between Pyongyang and Washington, but the relationship between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump was “truly great.”
Earlier this week, Mr. Trump ordered the Pentagon to scale down the annual war games with South Korea that have long been a point of contention between the allies and North Korea, and has since waxed lyrical about his relationship with Mr. Kim.
However, Ms. Kim dismissed the reduction in the size of the South Korean-U.S. Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise as “unworthy of comment” and said it did not change the “provocative and offensive” nature of the war games.
“The U.S. hostile policy toward the DPRK has remained unchanged and the U.S. and its followers are now violently conducting hostile military activities against the DPRK even this moment,” Ms. Kim said, using an acronym for the country’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim held three historic summits during Mr. Trump’s first term, brokered by then South Korean president Moon Jae-in, bringing the Korean Peninsula closer to a formal peace than it has ever been since a war between North and South Korea ended in a 1953 armistice that has remained the uneasy status quo ever since.
Kim Yo Jong described the relationship between the two leaders as ‘really great.’Jorge Silva/The Associated Press
Facing a stalemate in his war with Iran and unpopular at home, Mr. Trump has been attempting to revive a dialogue with Pyongyang that won him praise internationally.
“I know Kim Jong Un very well, and he’s going to be fine as long as we have a smart president,” he said Wednesday. “The fact that I get along with him – that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. He has 57 very powerful nuclear weapons.”
Where Mr. Trump got that number from is unclear. It’s unusual for U.S. officials to give a specific size for North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, which has been built up over years of failed denuclearization talks with successive U.S. presidents, and Mr. Trump’s figure would be near the lower end of most assessments.
Speaking to South Korean lawmakers Thursday, the country’s defence minister, Ahn Gyu-back, said Seoul believes Pyongyang has between 80 and 120 nuclear warheads.
He declined to answer any questions about whether Seoul was aware of or involved in behind-the-scenes discussions between the U.S. and North Korea, but said North Korea’s response seemed to suggest there was interest in Pyongyang in a potential meeting.
One opportunity for such a meeting could be in November, when Mr. Trump is expected to visit China for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen. While North Korea is not a member of APEC, that the meeting is being hosted by an ally could provide a good opportunity for Mr. Kim to travel to southern China.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said Thursday that Beijing “doesn’t have information” on a potential meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who is currently in Seoul, said any meeting was a matter for Pyongyang and Washington, but urged the U.S. to “change its long-standing hostile policy toward North Korea.”
While Mr. Trump’s sudden decision to downsize Ulchi Freedom Shield took some in South Korea by alarm – particularly as he directly tied it to the country’s lack of support for his war in Iran and continuing trade disputes – attempts at rapprochement on the Peninsula would be welcomed by current President Lee Jae-myung, a protégé of former leader Mr. Moon.
Relations between the two Koreas are at their lowest in decades, after an intensely hostile policy pursued by Mr. Lee’s predecessor, conservative Yoon Suk Yeol, who used the threat of North Korean infiltration to stage an abortive coup that ultimately resulted in his impeachment and imprisonment.
In 2024, Mr. Kim declared the South was now his country’s “primary foe” and officially abandoned the goal of unification, though he did not rule out a potential second invasion of the South by the North.
Mr. Lee’s administration has attempted to improve ties, though without much positive response from Pyongyang. Last month, South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said Seoul was dropping its long-standing demand of “denuclearization first” when it comes to talks, focusing instead on “peace first.”
“The ultimate goal of denuclearization has not been abandoned, but denuclearization first has,” Mr. Chung said. The stance is similar to that adopted by Mr. Trump in his first term. Analysts and peace activists have long argued that expecting North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons was a non-starter and an insistence on denuclearization above all else has only prolonged hostilities on the Peninsula.
“America’s maximalist negotiating position – that the North rapidly denuclearize – foreclosed progress on other goals, such as pausing North Korea’s missile-testing program, capping its stockpile of warheads and missiles, freezing its production of fissile material, or establishing a more regularized US-DPRK diplomatic relationship,” Evan Sankey, an analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote Wednesday. “The U.S. should use a new negotiating push to make progress on what is possible.”
With files from Alexandra Li in Beijing and Reuters