United States President Donald Trump is “receptive” to dialogue with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the White House has said, after a South Korea-based news site reported that Pyongyang repeatedly rebuffed Trump’s outreach efforts.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday that Trump would like to build on the “progress” made during his 2018 summit with Kim.
The summit in Singapore marked the first-ever meeting between a sitting US president and the leader of North Korea, which has been ruled by the Kim dynasty for nearly eight decades.
But while historic, the summit, which was followed by meetings in Vietnam and at the Demilitarized Zone dividing North and South Korea, failed to achieve Washington’s goal of halting the advance of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programmes.
“The president remains receptive to correspondence with Kim Jong Un,” Leavitt told reporters.
“As for specific correspondence, I will leave that to the president to answer,” Leavitt added.
Leavitt’s remarks came in response to a question about a report in NK News that said North Korean diplomats in New York had repeatedly refused to accept a letter from Trump to Kim.
Trump’s letter was aimed at “reopening communication channels between Washington and Pyongyang”, Seoul-based NK News reported, citing an “informed high-level source”.
Trump’s reported outreach comes as South Korea’s newly elected president, Lee Jae-myung, is leading Seoul to adopt a more reconciliatory posture towards Pyongyang.
On Wednesday, South Korea switched off loudspeakers broadcasting K-pop and other propaganda across the inter-Korean border in one of the first moves by Lee’s administration to lower tensions between the sides.
South Korea’s Ministry of National Defence said the move would help to “restore trust in inter-Korean relations” and “promote peace on the Korean Peninsula”.
North and South Korea remain technically at war after hostilities in the 1950-1953 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
