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<\/p>\nFormer national security adviser John Bolton said U.S. President Donald Trump might attempt to meet Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang, warning of unpredictable risks.<\/p>\n
\n Former National Security Advisor John Bolton listens to a question from a student at the John F. Kennedy Jr Forum at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Sept. 29, 2025.
\n REUTERS\/YONHAP\n <\/p>\n
John Bolton, who served as White House national security adviser during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term, suggested that Trump may seek to visit Pyongyang for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.<\/p>\n
“I think Trump would look at Pyongyang because […] he had the first meeting with the North Korean leader [in Singapore]. So doing it again breaks no new ground. It’s not a big PR stunt,” he said during the forum hosted by the Institute for Corean-American Studies in Washington on Tuesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Trump held three meetings with Kim during his first term: the first in Singapore in June 2018, the second in Hanoi in February 2019 and the third at the inter-Korean border village of Panmunjom in June 2019.<\/p>\n
Bolton argued that Trump’s motive for wanting another summit is largely image-driven \u2014 he wants “pictures” and a “distraction” from more difficult problems, and the point of a Pyongyang trip would simply be the publicity it generates.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“[Trump] wants something other than worrying about the war in the Middle East or prices in the United States, or the November election,” he said, referring to the U.S. midterm elections where control of Congress is at stake.<\/p>\n
He also recalled that at the 2018 Singapore summit, Trump had informally invited Kim to fly back to Pyongyang together aboard Air Force One \u2014 an idea aides talked him out of, and one Kim reportedly wasn’t keen on either.<\/p>\n
“[Trump] said to Kim, ‘Well, look, I’m flying back to Washington. Why don’t you ride on Air Force One with me, and we’ll stop in Pyongyang?’ After the Secret Service picked themselves up off the floor, we talked him out of it. And Kim didn’t want to do it either, fortunately,” he said.<\/p>\n
“But the purpose of a trip to Pyongyang is the publicity. That’s the sum and substance of it.”<\/p>\n
Still, Bolton was doubtful the United States would gain much even if a summit took place, saying he was skeptical there was anything meaningful to be extracted from Kim, and that North Korea would have carefully calculated what it stood to gain.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n U.S. President Donald Trump hosts an announcement on health care affordability in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on Aug. 31.
\n EPA\/YONHAP\n <\/p>\n
He also voiced concern about Trump’s tendency to treat diplomacy as a matter of personal rapport between leaders \u2014 essentially two men talking things out between themselves \u2014 calling that approach risky.<\/p>\n
“If he has a good relationship with Kim Jong-un, then U.S.-North Korea relations are good. He doesn’t need the State Department, the Defense Department, the Treasury Department or anybody else. It’s just the two buddies talking to one another,” he said.\u00a0“I think that’s dangerous. I think it’s naive, and particularly dealing with governments that do have the capacity to think at longer range. I am nervous about a meeting at the summit, with Trump on one side and almost any of these authoritarian leaders on the other.”<\/p>\n
Bolton cited the\u00a0recent scaling-back of the Ulchi Freedom Shield joint exercise \u2014 a major South Korea-U.S. military drill \u2014\u00a0recalling that at the 2018 Singapore summit Trump had impulsively agreed to suspend joint drills with South Korea after Kim raised objections, catching his own aides off guard.<\/p>\n
“Kim complained about the annual field exercise. Trump said, ‘You know, I agree with you. It’s very provocative. It costs too much money. It’s very dangerous. I’m just going to cancel it this year,'” Bolton said of the Singapore summit where he, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and chief of staff to Trump John Kelly participated.<\/p>\n
“Pompeo and Kelly and I were just sitting there with our mouths closed, hoping that our jaws hadn’t dropped to the table in front of us because there was zero planning for that […] Just a few weeks ago, there was zero planning for it as well. So you put Trump across the table from Kim. Who knows what he’ll say?”<\/p>\n
Bolton further raised the possibility that North Korea, having gained combat experience and drone-warfare familiarity by sending troops to fight in Russia’s war in Ukraine, could attempt a limited military provocation against South Korea \u2014 for instance, occupying a few islands beyond the Northern Limit Line as a kind of test case to gauge Trump’s resolve, a scenario he said worries him considerably.<\/p>\n
On President Lee Jae Myung, Bolton advised caution about actively pushing for a Trump-Kim summit, suggesting it isn’t necessarily a bad thing not to pursue such a meeting aggressively, and that care is needed given the unpredictability of what Trump might say or do.<\/p>\n
“Be careful what you wish for and what he might say and do […] That’s why I think the risks are high here. There are so many uncertainties that what in some circumstances at least arguably might be very sensible things to do in a Trump world don’t necessarily lead to sensible consequences,” he said.<\/p>\n
“There’s no doubt of the urgency of matters on the [Korean] peninsula and in East Asia generally, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the answer is to gin up the president of the United States to think about what he would do about it, because there’s no telling what response you might get.”<\/p>\n
BY PARK JONG-SUH [lee.jian@joongang.co.kr]<\/p>\n
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former national security adviser John Bolton said U.S. President Donald Trump might attempt to meet Kim Jong-un in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":139826,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[129],"class_list":["post-139825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pyongyang","tag-pyongyang"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}