Will there soon be a fourth meeting between the two leaders? Donald Trump said Thursday, January 23, that he wanted to reconnect with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, “an intelligent guy” whom the American president had met three times during his first term, but without progress on nuclear power.
Asked about the conservatives’ favorite television program, Fox News, the new occupant of the Oval Office reaffirmed that Kim Jong-un “liked” him and (that he) got along well with” him. While the star host of the channel Sean Hannity, fully committed to his cause, asked Donald Trump if he would contact him again, he replied: “Yeah, I will”. “Kim Jong-un is an intelligent guy,” assured the American president.
The first sitting American head of state to meet a member of the Kim dynasty, Donald Trump had a well-known epistolary relationship with Kim Jong-un. The two men met first at a historic summit in June 2018 in Singapore, the second in Hanoi in February 2019 – a fiasco – and the last time on the border between the two Koreas in June 2019. The United States and Pyongyang held their last denuclearization talks in Stockholm in October 2019, but without real progress.
“Kim tells me everything”
A week ago, Republican Marco Rubio, who had not yet been confirmed by the Senate as Donald Trump’s chief diplomat, called Kim Jong-un a “dictator” and affirmed that Washington would do its utmost to to avoid a crisis with this country. According to Marco Rubio, the North Korean leader “sees nuclear weapons as his insurance policy to stay in power, and it is so important to him that no amount of sanctions have dissuaded him from developing this capability “nuclear.
The new Secretary of State, however, welcomed Donald Trump’s approach during his first term, recognizing that he himself was “very skeptical” at the time. “At the end of the day, he didn’t reach a lasting agreement. But he succeeded […] to stop missile tests. This did not stop the development of the program, but at least it calmed the situation,” Marco Rubio added last week.
During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump said that Kim Jong-un “would like” to see him return to the White House, and that he got along well with him. Kim “tells me everything. He told me everything,” he boasted to American journalist Bob Woodward for his book “Rage” in 2020.