South Korean President Lee Jae-myung said the US-North Korea summit could bring peace and advocated talks with the rebel nation.
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Lee said US President Donald Trump’s commitment to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was a “hard-won opportunity for change” and said he hoped the “long-interrupted dialogue” between North Korea and the US would resume.
President Trump said he plans to meet with Kim “later this year.”
It is not clear whether a meeting was actually planned. Kim Jong Un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, said she was unaware of any communication between the two leaders.
Mr. Trump met with Mr. Kim three times during his first term, including in Singapore and Vietnam, but there did not appear to be any progress toward denuclearization.
In his speech, Lee said, “This will lay the foundation for developing dialogue between the parties aiming to end the war on the Korean Peninsula and transition to a peace regime.”
The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, so North and South Korea are still officially at war.
As part of this process, South Korea aims to prevent North Korea from further advancing its nuclear and missile capabilities, he said.
This would be followed by a decline in North Korea’s such capabilities in the medium term, after which it would be “(a) moving toward a nuclear-weapon-free Korean Peninsula in the long term.”
At a subsequent summit with President Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Lee reportedly discussed strategic investment projects between the two countries. South Korea had pledged to invest $350 billion in the United States under a trade deal signed with Washington last year.
According to National Security Adviser Wi Song Luck, the two leaders reportedly pledged to deepen cooperation in areas such as nuclear submarine fuel, reprocessing, shipbuilding cooperation, and wartime operational control transition.
“President Trump also reaffirmed his desire to engage in dialogue with North Korea,” Wi told South Korean media.
However, the goal of North Korea’s denuclearization may be difficult to achieve, as Kim Yo Jong said in a statement last week that North Korea’s nuclear status is “absolute.”
“If they believe that (denuclearization) is really possible, they will be called idiots who don’t know anything about the world,” she said. North Korea’s nuclear weapons “contribute significantly to deterring the nefarious acts of international rogues.”
