U. S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will begin their second summit in less than a year when they meet in the Vietnamese capital on Wednesday, with the U. S. side seeking tangible steps by North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
HANOI (Reuters) – U. S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will begin their second summit in less than a year when they meet in the Vietnamese capital on Wednesday, with the U. S. side seeking tangible steps by North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
The White House said Trump would meet Kim at Hanoi’s French-colonial-era Metropole Hotel at 6:30 p.m. (1130 GMT) and have a 20-minute one-on-one conversation before a dinner scheduled to last just over an hour and a half.
Trump flew into Hanoi on Air Force One late on Tuesday.
“Just arrived in Vietnam,” he wrote in a Twitter post. “Thank you to all of the people for the great reception in Hanoi. Tremendous crowds, and so much love!”
Kim arrived by train early in the day after a three-day, 3,000-km (1,850-mile) journey from his capital, Pyongyang, through China. He completed the last stretch from a border station to Hanoi by car.
The two leaders, who seemed to strike up a surprisingly warm relationship at their first summit in Singapore last June, will be accompanied at dinner by two aides and interpreters, The White House said earlier.
They will meet again on Thursday, it said.
Their talks come eight months after the historic summit in Singapore, the first between a sitting U. S. president and a North Korean leader.
While much of that first meeting was about breaking the ice after decades of bitter animosity between their two countries, this time there will be pressure to move beyond a vaguely worded commitment by Kim to work toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
Trump’s critics at home have warned him against cutting a deal that would do little to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, urging specific, verifiable North Korean action to abandon the nuclear weapons that threaten the United States.
