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Trump-Kim: two previous summits
PARIS, June 30, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Before their meeting in the Demilitarized
Zone on Sunday, US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un
had already met twice, with very different results.
– Singapore success –
June 12, 2018 saw the president of the world’s most powerful democracy
shake hands with the third generation scion of the ruling Kim dynasty, a
lineage that has ruled North Korea for more than 60 years.
Trump called the first face-to-face talks between the two men a “fantastic
meeting”.
The summit ended with a joint declaration agreeing to the “complete
denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula”, a stock phrase favoured by
Pyongyang that falls short of long-standing US demands for North Korea to
give up its atomic arsenal.
Trump said the denuclearisation process would begin “very, very quickly”,
after decades of tensions over Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions.
“There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” he tweeted early
the next day.
A week later Kim told Chinese President Xi Jinping that “if the two parties
can solidly implement the summit’s consensus step by step, it will open a
new, important phase of the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.”
– Hanoi failure –
Eight months later, on February 28, 2019, the second summit between the two
leaders collapsed in Hanoi, Vietnam.
It ended abruptly without even a joint statement as the pair failed to
agree on what the North would be willing to give up in exchange for sanctions
relief.
Trump said Pyongyang wanted the lifting of all sanctions imposed over its
banned nuclear and ballistic weapons programs, something US officials were
unwilling to do. North Korea said it had only wanted some of the measures
eased.
However, the two men insisted the talks ended on friendly terms, with Trump
saying in April there was the possibility of a third summit.
But a few days after the meeting in Hanoi the official North Korea press
agency KCNA said in an editorial that the summit had failed, laying the blame
with the United States.
BSS/AFP/SSS/1611 hrs