WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said he’ll meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Feb. 27-28 in Vietnam.Trump didn’t say which city in Vietnam would host the summit.
The announcement came as the top U.S. negotiator with North Korea, Stephen Biegun, was set to meet with his North Korean counterpart on Wednesday in Pyongyang.
Trump and Kim met in Singapore last June in the first summit between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader, a meeting that resulted in a vaguely worded pledge “to work toward the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
Trump also asserted that, “If I had not been elected president of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea.”
The Vietnamese city where the two leaders will meet was not announced.Both Trump and Kim, whose nations have been locked in a hostile relationship for almost 70 years.
Last year, North Korea released American detainees, suspended nuclear and long-range missile tests and dismantled a nuclear test site and parts of a rocket launch facility without the presence of outside experts.
North Korea has promised to destroy all its facilities for making nuclear-bomb fuel, the U.S.’s special representative Stephen Biegun said Jan. 31, in a sign that Trump was seeking clearer disarmament steps from the next summit.
Last year’s Trump-Kim summit drew some 3,000 journalists to Singapore, boosting the city-state’s hospitality industry and generating tens of millions of dollars of media exposure.
