A veteran of two Trump-Kim summits in 2018 and 2019 said re-elected U.S. President Donald Trump is likely to wake up the next day to a call inviting him to Pyongyang for a summit with Kim Jong Un.
“If I were Kim Jong Un, talking to my advisers in Pyongyang, I would consider whether I [should] “The day after the election, I called President-elect Trump to congratulate him,” and said, “Why don’t you come to Pyongyang?” Let’s meet here,” said former Trump adviser John Bolton.
“Trump might do that,” Bolton continued in an interview with VOA’s Korean service on Friday.
During Bolton’s tenure as national security adviser, Trump and Kim Jong-un frequently expressed mutual trust and held summits in Singapore in June 2018 and Hanoi in February 2019, as well as an impromptu meeting on the border between North and South Korea in June 2019.
The Hanoi summit collapsed after Trump abandoned Kim’s offer to dismantle North Korea’s main Yongbyon nuclear power plant in exchange for lifting sanctions, eight months after Kim refused to engage with the United States or South Korea since U.S.-North Korea talks collapsed in Stockholm.
But Bolton said that did not rule out the possibility that Kim might try again or that Trump might accept it.
“The danger of another Trump administration is that he values the deal more than the substance of the deal, which he often does not understand in an international context,” Bolton said, a frequent critic of Bolton’s remarks since leaving office. The former president’s approach to foreign affairs. administrative.
Gary Samour, the former White House arms control and weapons of mass destruction coordinator during the Obama administration, told VOA by phone on Friday: “Kim Jong Un likely believes that if there is another summit, he can persuade Trump to cancel it. international economic sanctions” and “weakening the U.S. and South Korea [South Korea] Make alliances like Trump did at the Singapore meeting. “
In 2018, Trump announced at a press conference after his summit with Kim Jong-un in Singapore that the United States would suspend military exercises with South Korea, calling it “very provocative” and “extremely costly.”
However, joint exercises resumed under Trump’s successor, President Joe Biden. The United States and South Korea are currently holding their annual Freedom Shield exercises. The event begins on March 4 and will continue through Thursday.
Harry Kazianis, senior editor of 19FortyFive website and president of the Rogue States Project, believes that another Trump-Kim summit is unlikely.
“Currently, North Korea may receive billions of dollars a year from Russia to help Putin equip its troops for the war in Ukraine, while China may rarely enforce sanctions. If these conditions hold, Kim Jong Un has little to gain from dealing with North Korea. Trump Pu,” he said.
However, he told VOA via email on Friday that Kim may need to engage with the U.S. leader again if Trump wants to end the war in Ukraine and successfully pressure China to impose sanctions.
Scott Snyder, director of the U.S.-South Korea Policy Project at the Council on Foreign Relations, said via email on Friday that Pyongyang has made it clear it is not interested in negotiations.
To resume diplomacy, he said, “both sides must find a way to put the Hanoi experience behind them and establish new ad hoc practices and mutually beneficial reasons to pursue a new relationship.”
Sangjin Cho contributed to this report.
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