US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he had received a “great” letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and would probably meet him again in the not-too-distant future as part of efforts to persuade him to give up his nuclear weapons.
Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump defended stuttering U.S. negotiations with Kim, saying that if it had not been for his administration “you’d be having a nice big fat war in Asia.” He reiterated that there was no hurry.
“I’m not in any rush. I don’t have to rush. All I know is there’s no rockets, there’s no testing,” he said, referring to North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests that have been halted since the second half of 2017.
Trump said he had watched coverage of Kim’s New Year speech on the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service.
“They said that in Chairman Kim’s speech he really wants to get together, he wants to denuclearize and a lot of good things are happening,” Trump said.
“They really do want to do something. Now, does that mean it’s going to be done? Who knows? A deal’s a deal, you never know, but I tell you, we’ve established a very good relationship with North Korea.”
“We’ll probably now have another meeting. He’d like to meet, I’d like to meet,” Trump said. “We’ll set that up, we’ll be setting that up in the not-too-distant future.”
Kim vowed to work toward denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula when he met with Trump for the first time at a summit in Singapore in June, but there has been little concrete progress since.
Kim said in a nationally televised New Year address on Tuesday that he was ready to meet again with Trump anytime, but warned he may take a “new path” if U.S. sanctions and pressure against the country continued.
Trump, who in 2017 threatened to rain “fire and fury like the world has never seen” on North Korea because of the threat its nuclear weapons and missiles posed to the United States, said a world war had been averted.
“That was going to be a war – there could have been a World War Three to be honest with you … And instead, we have somebody who I really think wants to get on to economic development and making a lot of success and money, frankly, for his country.”
Trump said North Korea had “tremendous” potential, and added: “We’ll help them out too.”
