SINGAPORE — President Donald Trump cast his Tuesday summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un as a “one-time shot” for the autocratic leader to ditch his nuclear weapons and enter the community of nations, saying he would know within moments if Kim is serious about the talks.
Trump said Saturday he was embarking on a “mission of peace,” as he departed the Group of Seven meeting in Canada to fly to the summit site in Singapore. Saying he has a “clear objective in mind” to convince Kim to abandon his nuclear program in exchange for unspecified “protections” from the U.S., Trump acknowledged that the direction of the high-stakes meeting is unpredictable, adding it “will always be spur of the moment.”
“It’s a one-time shot and I think it’s going to work out very well,” he told reporters. The meeting will be the first between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader. Unlike traditional summits between heads of state, where most of the work is completed in advance of a photo-op, U.S. officials say the only thing certain ahead of these talks will be their unpredictability.
“This is a leader who really is an unknown personality,” Trump said of Kim. “People don’t know much about him. I think that he’s going to surprise on the upside, very much on the upside.” The Kim sit-down comes as Trump’s international negotiating skills have faced their toughest tests to date with mixed results. Tensions flared at the G-7 summit between Trump and U.S. allies over his protectionist economic policies and decisions to exit the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate accord.
Trump rated his relationships with U.S. partners as “a 10,” though erstwhile allies spent much of the weekend directly challenging Trump’s policy positions. As he looks to the Kim meeting, Trump is taking a high-stakes risk in hopes of containing the increasingly challenging national security threats from North Korea’s advanced nuclear and ballistic missile programs. Seeing Nobel Peace Prize laurels and eyeing potential to show up his critics at home and abroad, Trump is granting Kim the international legitimacy he’s long sought in hopes of securing a legacy-defining accord.
“He could take that nation with those great people and truly make it great,” Trump said. “That’s why I feel positive, because it makes so much sense.” Trump also praised the North Koreans, saying they have been “really working very well with us” during preparations for the summit, even though Trump had canceled the summit last month following a recent period of what he called “tremendous anger and open hostility” from the North Korean government. But then Trump did a quick pivot, signaling almost immediately after scrapping the meeting that he was open to going ahead with it after all.
