With US talks in limbo, Korean leaders hold surprise summit
SEOUL, Korea, Republic Of — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in met Saturday for the second time in a month, exchanging a huge bear hug and broad smiles in a surprise summit at a border village to discuss Kim’s potential meeting with President Donald Trump and ways to follow through on the peace initiatives of the rivals’ earlier summit.
Following a whirlwind 24 hours that saw Trump cancel the highly anticipated June 12 meeting with Kim before saying it’s potentially back on, the Korean leaders took matters into their own hands.
Their quickly arranged meeting Saturday appears to highlight a sense of urgency on both sides of the world’s most heavily armed border: Moon wants to secure a summit that he sees as the best way to ease animosity that had some fearing a war last year; Kim may see the sit-down with Trump as necessary to easing pressure from crushing sanctions and to winning security assurances in a region surrounded by enemies.
Kim, in a telling line from a dispatch issued by the North’s state-run news service on Sunday, “expressed his fixed will on the historic (North Korea)-U.S. summit talks.” The two Korean leaders agreed to “positively co-operate with each other as ever to improve (North Korea)-U.S. relations and establish (a) mechanism for permanent and durable peace.”