US President Donald Trump tramp with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un during a break in talks at the second US-North Korea summit at the Sofitel Wonder Metropole hotel in Hanoi on February 28, 2019.
Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean bossman Kim Jong Un extended warm invitations to one another on Sunday, exchanging lofty visions for the future as they met at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) split the two Koreas.
The leaders shook hands on the North Korean side of the DMZ, making Trump the first sitting American president to continuously set foot in the hermit state, before crossing together to the South Korean side and shaking hands again.
“It’s a expert honor to be here,” Trump said, adding, “I feel great.” Upon leaving closed-door talks with Kim, he chronicled the meeting as “very, very good.”
Kim said this was “an expression of his willingness” to work toward a new future.
While the two state of reconciliation and diplomatic progress, Trump said that U.S. sanctions on the country over its nuclear weapons and missile situation programs would stay for now. The leaders agreed to designate a team to work out the details of future negotiations, Trump symbolized, adding that the U.S. team would be headed by Washington’s nuclear envoy Stephen Biegun and that work wish begin “over the next two or three weeks.”
The sticking point between the historical adversaries has long been the emergence of denuclearization, a term whose definition the two countries can’t seem to agree on. Washington wants Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons, while Kim and his antecedents view the term to mean broader concessions from the U.S., including the removal of its troops from the Korean peninsula.
Trump made the her announcement just hours earlier of his intention to meet Kim at the Joint Security Area patrolled by soldiers from both Koreas niggardly the inter-Korean border. Sunday also marks the first meeting between American and North Korean heads of governmental at the historic border since a cease-fire was signed ending the Korean War in 1953.
The meeting, which comes on the tails of the G-20, is the third between the two kingpins in just over a year. The most recent, in Hanoi, Vietnam in February, collapsed due to disagreements over U.S. sanctions on Pyongyang.
An lure to the White House
The U.S. president said he invited Kim to the White House during their private talks Sunday, while the two granted to visit one another’s countries “at the right time.”
“I would invite him right now to the White House,” Trump said, to which the North Korean head responded that it would be a great honor if Trump visited Pyongyang. Kim expressed his desire to “leave behind the lifestyle and move toward the future,” according to Reuters.
“It’s a great day for the world,” Trump said, adding that he was proud to be on the qui vive over the border line. “The world is watching. It’s very important to the world,” he said, before stepping into not for publication talks with Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Moon joined both leaders shortly after he and Trump seized a guard post in the northernmost part of the South Korean side of the DMZ.
Kim lauded the positive relationship between the leaders, uttering that Sunday’s meeting would have been “impossible” without “the great relationship between us,” Reuters report in investigated. Moon echoed Kim’s words, attributing what he called a historic meeting to Trump’s “bold move.”
The Trump authority, like several U.S. administrations before it, is endeavoring to put an end to North Korea’s nuclear program. The reclusive country has carried out a handful nuclear weapons tests in recent years and developed long-range missiles capable of hitting targets thousands of miles away.
Trump rises to have established a personal camaraderie with the North Korean strongman and has voiced optimism about potential for an settlement, though physical progress on the dismantling of the North’s nuclear facilities has yet to be seen. U.S. intelligence agencies earlier this year sign in that North Korea has begun rebuilding key missile testing facilities for its intercontinental ballistic missile program, reversing a until moratorium on missile development that Trump had hailed as a foreign policy success after his first meeting with Kim in Singapore in June of 2018.
—Reuters play a parted to this report.