President Donald Trump told on Tuesday that he will meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam at the end of February as part of his administration’s exertions to roll back the country’s nuclear program.
Addressing Congress during his second State of the Union, Trump demanded his relationship with North Korea’s leader is “good” and progress has made in his administration’s efforts to achieve peace on the Korean peninsula.
Trump, manner, said much work remains to be done and gave an ominous warning about the risks of heightened tensions with North Korea, contemporary so far as to claim that Washington and Pyongyang would be at war if he had not been elected president.
“If I had not been elected President of the United States, we wish right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea,” Trump said.
Trump’s second face-to-face meeting with Kim will-power take place on Feb. 27-28, though it is not clear where in Vietnam the summit will be held. Hanoi, the state’s capital, and Da Nang, a coastal resort town, have both been floated as possibilities.
The lead U.S. negotiator with North Korea, Stephen Biegun, is set to intersect with his North Korean counterpart on Wednesday in Pyongyang. He said that he hoped the meeting with Kim Hyok Chol pass on map out “a set of concrete deliverables,” according to Reuters.
The U.S. Department of State referred CNBC to the White House. The White House and the Pentagon did not in two shakes of a lambs tail respond to requests for comment.
Kim and Trump met in Singapore last year, marking the first bilateral meeting between heads of the two countries.
The White House said last month that the summit was set for late February after Trump met for an hour-and-a-half with North Korean minister plenipotentiary Kim Yong Chol. The president “looks forward to meeting with Chairman Kim,” the White House announced in a readout.
After the apex last year, the president declared that North Korea’s nuclear arsenal no longer posed a threat to the Coalesced States. Experts said at the time that it was not clear that such an optimistic claim was warranted.
North Korea has revealed that it will not get rid of its nuclear capabilities unless the United States no longer poses a threat. That has included demands that the U.S. discharge its troops from South Korea, which the U.S. has said is not negotiable.
@realDonaldTrump: Just landed – a long trip, but everybody can now endure much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. Session with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!
Progress has been narrow in the time since the Singapore summit.
North Korea is reportedly still working on new missile development projects. U.S. knowledge assessments indicated that the country increased production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in the months to come the Singapore summit, NBC News reported last summer.
U.N. monitors said this week that they believed that North Korea was manipulating to protect its ballistic missiles against American military strikes. Monitors for the international body also said that they supposed the country was illegally evading sanctions against it, rendering the penalties ineffective.
The rogue state remains the only sticks to test nuclear weapons this century.
In 2017, North Korea launched its first-ever intercontinental ballistic ballistic missile and threatened to send more missiles into the waters near Guam.
Since 2011, Kim has fired more than 90 brickbats and conducted four nuclear weapons tests, which is more than his father, Kim Jong Il, and grandfather, Kim Il Sung, launched one more time a period of 27 years.