President Donald Trump has said he will invite North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to the White House if their nuclear summit next week goes well.
Speaking on the White House lawn after a day of preparations with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Mr Trump said he would “certainly” invite Mr Kim to the White House if the talks were productive. He added that he thought the North Korean leader would look on the invitation “very favourably”.
The comments came less than a week after Mr Trump decided to re-enter the Singapore summit, which he abruptly shut down last month after the North cut off contact. He warned on Thursday that he could easily walk away from the talks again, saying: “I did it once before!”
But Mr Trump seemed optimistic at the White House press conference, saying it was possible that the two countries could sign an agreement ending the Korean War. Signing a joint communique would be “the easy part” of a long process of negotiations, Mr Trump said.
Earlier, he told reporters that he felt “well prepared” for the summit, adding: “I don’t think I have to prepare that much.”
Mr Abe visited the White House on Thursday to coordinate strategy with Mr Trump ahead of next week’s summit. Chief on his list of priorities was the return North Korean abductees from Japan – an issue he discussed with the US president during his visit last fall.
While Mr Abe said he would prefer to discuss the issue with Mr Kim himself, he said he felt confident that Mr Trump would raise it with the North Korean leader in their upcoming meeting. The US president, he said, “is one of the leaders who understands the issue the most, the greatest”.
Mr Abe was also reportedly seeking an agreement with North Korea on their ballistic missile and chemical weapons programmes, on top of their nuclear weapons arsenal. Japanese citizens were forced to run for cover twice this summer, when the North sent ballistic missiles flying over the island of Hokkaido.
US officials had prepared for weeks for the 12 June nuclear summit, before Mr Trump abruptly called it off last month. Then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo met with Mr Kim in April, and the White House sent a team to Singapore to discuss details of the meeting as recently as last month.
Mr Trump announced that the meeting was back on again last week, after meeting with a senior North Korean envoy and receiving a letter from Mr Kim himself. He described the letter as “interesting,” but later said he had not opened it.
On Thursday, he revealed that the letter had been a simple greeting from Mr Kim.
“It was really a very warm letter, a very nice letter,” Mr Trump said, “Nothing other than, ‘We look forward to seeing you, we look forward to the summit, and hopefully some wonderful things will work out’.”
