SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean officials Monday indicated that President Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, could agree on a joint political statement declaring an end to the 1950-53 Korean War when they meet in Hanoi, Vietnam, later this week.
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean officials Monday indicated that President Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, could agree on a joint political statement declaring an end to the 1950-53 Korean War when they meet in Hanoi, Vietnam, later this week.
“The possibility is open,” said Kim Eui-kyeom, a spokesman for South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, referring to the results expected from the Trump-Kim summit meeting scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday. “We still don’t know exactly what format the end-of-war declaration will take, but there is an ample possibility of North Korea and the United States agreeing to such a declaration.”
Moon has strongly advocated an end-of-war declaration to build trust between North Korea and the United States and to prod the North to move toward giving up its nuclear weapons. The North and the United States have remained technically at war since the Korean War was halted in a truce in 1953, and Washington still keeps 28,500 troops in South Korea to prevent the war from rekindling.
Until now, South Korean officials, who are closely monitoring pre-summit meeting negotiations between North Korea and the United States, had sounded skeptical that Trump and Kim Jong Un would agree to an end-of-war declaration during their Hanoi meeting. The remarks by the South Korean spokesman indicated such a declaration was now being seriously discussed as Trump seeks to encourage Kim to take steps toward denuclearization.
As Kim heads to Hanoi by train, North Korean and U. S. negotiators are already there trying to hammer out an agenda and other details for the summit meeting, including what first steps toward denuclearization that North Korea should take. North Korea has offered to dismantle its nuclear complex in Yongbyon, which houses plutonium and uranium enrichment facilities, but said it would do so only when the United States took “corresponding” trust-building measures.
When they met for the first time, in June in Singapore, Trump and Kim produced a vaguely worded agreement to build “new” relations between their countries, and to work toward a peace regime and “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” — but the agreement was short on specifics.
