Standing in front of the White House, South Korean National Security Advisor Chung Eui-yong announced the first ever meeting between a US president and North Korean leader, which he said would take place by the end of May.
Chung had recently returned from Pyongyang, where he met Kim, who, he said “expressed his eagerness to meet President Trump as soon as possible.”
Trump hailed “great progress” in the push to persuade Pyongyang to end its nuclear weapons program.
“Meeting being planned!” he tweeted. “Kim Jong Un talked about denuclearization with the South Korean Representatives, not just a freeze. Also, no missile testing by North Korea during this period of time.”
“Great progress being made but sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached.”
News of the summit is the latest step in a quickening diplomatic detente that has seen North and South Korea exchange envoys.
Pyongyang also sent a delegation to the Winter Olympics in the South, which Seoul had dubbed the “Peace Games” and which saw the two countries marching under a unified flag.
The thaw came after a period of extreme tension between Washington and Pyongyang that sounded like the growing drumbeat of war.
Just months ago, Trump mocked Kim by calling him “little rocket man” and Kim returned the favor by describing Trump as “mentally deranged” and a “dotard.”
The United States and North Korea were foes throughout the Cold War and fought on opposite sides of a bloody war in the 1950s.
In the last two decades, they have been engaged in what is perhaps the world’s most dangerous nuclear standoff, with 30,000 US military personnel stationed just over the border in the South.
– Paradigm shift –
Pyongyang’s decades-long race to develop a nuclear weapon capable of hitting the continental United States has proved a problem for successive administrations.
Trump’s strategy has been to ramp up sanctions, tighten the diplomatic screws and regularly threaten military force.
The White House said in a statement that strategy of “maximum pressure” would stay in place, for now.
“We look forward to the denuclearization of North Korea. In the meantime, all sanctions and maximum pressure must remain.”
But the prospect of a top-level meeting is a paradigm shift.
North Korean leaders have sought face-to-face talks with consecutive US presidents, who have rebuffed the idea as an effort to achieve strategic parity that does not exist.
Pyongyang now seems to have achieved its goal, while only agreeing to a temporary suspension of nuclear tests.
It is a gambit fraught with risk for Trump. On multiple occasions, Kim’s father Kim Jong Il dangled the prospect of talks and denuclearization as a means of buying time, easing sanctions and dividing South Korea from its allies.
However his decision also carries historic echoes of Richard Nixon’s visit to communist China or Barack Obama’s overture to Cuba, both of which offered the hope of better ties.
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