SEOUL, South Korea _ The leaders of North and South Korea met Saturday to discuss the canceled summit with Donald Trump, less than a day after the U.S. president signaled that the meeting may be back on, citing "very productive" talks between the two countries.
South Korea's Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un spent two hours together at the truce village of Panmunjom, and had a candid discussion about the potential U.S.-Korea meeting, Moon's office said in text message.
Trump said Friday night that the June summit with Kim could go ahead after talks between the two countries.
"We are having very productive talks with North Korea about reinstating the Summit which, if it does happen, will likely remain in Singapore on the same date, June 12th, and, if necessary, will be extended beyond that date," Trump said in a Twitter post.
Moon crossed the border to meet Kim in an area of Panmunjom controlled by North Korea. They discussed how to implement the Panmunjom Declaration and the success of a potential Trump-Kim meeting, according to the text from the president's office.
Trump canceled the planned summit in a letter to Kim on Thursday _ and then pivoted a day later. "We are talking to them now," he said in Washington Friday, saying the summit might proceed and "it could even be the 12th."
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Friday that "we are working on plans going forward." While there are always "high points and low points" in diplomacy, she said, "we hope that the meeting will go forward at some point."
The comments reflected a broadly shared perception inside the White House and State Department that the two leaders still want to meet and will "We would like to do it," Trump said, and "they very much like to do it."
Less than a year after the two leaders traded threats of nuclear war, the back-and-forth over whether the summit will even happen reflects both Trump's lead-from-the-gut style of decision-making and North Korea's long-standing penchant for unpredictable behavior.
U.S. officials argue that the administration has already won a great deal from North Korea, including a moratorium on missile testing and the release of three American prisoners, without giving up anything in return. A White House-led advance team is going to Singapore this weekend as planned to deal with the logistics of a potential summit, Politico reported.
But the latest developments also exemplified how quickly aspirations for successful talks between North Korea and the U.S. _ which remain technically at war _ can rise and fall.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a Senate committee Thursday that U.S. negotiators had been getting only "dial tones" when they tried calling their North Korean counterparts in recent days, which coincided with increasingly sharp rhetoric from Pyongyang about U.S. intentions. Trump cited North Korea's "tremendous anger and open hostility" as his reason for canceling the summit.
At the same time, it also was increasingly clear that the administration's goal of "total denuclearization" of the Korean peninsula was interpreted differently in North Korea, which analysts say is unlikely to give up all of its nuclear capabilities and especially not in short order, as the U.S. has demanded.
"We weren't getting the right signals previously, so hopefully we will in the future," Nauert said. "We didn't want to go to a meeting just for the sake of going to a meeting. There had to be something to come out of it."
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(Wadhams and Pettypiece reported from Washington. Justin Sink, Shinhye Kang, Daniel Flatley, Jennifer Epstein and Kanga Kong contributed to this report.)
