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This week, three members of the NK News team unpack their time at the APEC summit in Gyeongju and discuss how North Korea featured in the week’s diplomatic drama.
Despite high expectations, U.S. President Donald Trump did not meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his trip to Korea, though Pyongyang still loomed large in many of the summit’s side discussions.
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U.S. President Donald Trump and South Korean President Lee Jae-myung pledged to continue efforts to forge a lasting “peace” with North Korea at a summit on Wednesday, despite low prospects for a Trump meeting with Kim Jong Un during his visit.
At a meeting on the sidelines of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) events in South Korea, Lee praised Trump’s “wonderful skills as a peacemaker” and offered Seoul’s support for his diplomatic outreach to Pyongyang.
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South Korea’s National Assembly Speaker Woo Won-shik shook hands and exchanged greetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ahead of China’s large-scale military parade on Wednesday, according to Woo’s office.
The brief interaction took place despite the DPRK’s hardline policy describing the South as an “enemy state” and its rejection of the Lee Jae-myung administration’s recent diplomatic overtures to improve inter-Korean ties.
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U.S. President Donald Trump said he wants to revive diplomacy with North Korea and hold a summit with Kim Jong Un “this year,” boasting of his “very friendly” relationship with the DPRK autocrat while meeting his new South Korean counterpart for the first time.
Trump’s remarks came after ROK President Lee Jae-myung called on the U.S. leader to act as a “peacemaker” on the divided Korean Peninsula during a summit at the White House on Monday, even voicing hope for the construction of a Trump Tower in North Korea.
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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un inspected the country’s largest new warship under development on the west coast and called this week’s U.S.-ROK military drills “the clearest expression of a will to provoke a war,” according to state media on Tuesday.
The allies’ annual Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) joint exercises “constitute a clearly stated position that unhesitatingly shows their intent to be most hostile and confrontational toward the DPRK,” Kim reportedly said at the Nampho Shipyard on Monday.
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