Having concluded a memorandum of understanding with Iran aimed at ending the conflict in the Middle East, U.S. President Donald Trump now wants to focus on resolving “the North Korea issue”.
“The president Trump said that the time had come to pay attention to the North Korea question,” Lee Jae Myung told reporters in Seoul, revealing to them the details of his meeting with the U.S. president at the G7 summit in Evian.
The South Korean president also said that he had told Mr. Trump that “sanctions and pressure” imposed on North Korea due to its nuclear program were “ineffective”.
“The effectiveness of sanctions has diminished due to military cooperation between North Korea and Russia related to the war in Ukraine,” he continued.
“Even a small amount of aid from Russia is of great use for North Korea,” according to him.
Mr. Lee wrote on X that he had with Donald Trump “in-depth conversations about peace on the Korean peninsula and the relations between Korea and the United States, and that significant progress has been made”.
The two Koreas remain technically at war, because their 1950-1953 conflict ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty, and they are separated by a demilitarized zone along which the border runs.
– Signals from Trump to Kim –
Kim Jong Un has recently sought to bolster his stature among his allies by sending troops and munitions to support Russia’s war against Ukraine.
He also welcomed to Pyongyang Chinese President Xi Jinping, shortly after the latter had hosted back-to-back summits in Beijing with Mr. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Neither Pyongyang’s official statements nor Beijing’s mentioned the issue of North Korea’s denuclearization, which experts interpreted as China’s tacit acceptance.
Since the 2019 failure of a Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi on denuclearization and sanctions relief, Pyongyang has repeatedly declared itself an “irreversible” nuclear state.
Mr. Trump met Mr. Kim three times during his first term, once declaring that they had fallen “in love” as he sought to conclude a long-sought agreement on denuclearization.
But no tangible progress has been made.
On Sunday, a few hours after announcing a deal with Iran, Mr. Trump posted on social media a captionless photograph of himself with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, taken during their meeting in Singapore in 2018.
Mr. Trump intensified his outreach to Mr. Kim during a tour of Asia last year, claiming to be “100% open” to a meeting. The offer went unanswered.
The American president even went against decades of American policy by stating that North Korea was “somehow a nuclear power”.
