A renewed summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un remains unscheduled, with Washington having received no response from Pyongyang to recent efforts to arrange talks, according to Reuters.
Reuters based its report on five people familiar with discussions involving U.S. and South Korean officials.
The possibility of another Trump-Kim meeting had attracted attention ahead of President Trump’s planned diplomatic travel in Asia and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit scheduled for 18–19 November in Shenzhen, China.
Trump said in August that he planned to meet Kim later this year and indicated that the North Korean leader had responded to his outreach.
More recently, however, Trump has played down expectations of an imminent meeting.
A White House official told Reuters that U.S. policy toward North Korea had not changed and that Trump remained prepared to speak with Kim without preconditions, but said there was currently no meeting to announce.
South Korean officials also say they have seen no indication that Pyongyang is preparing for a summit.
North Korean state media has suggested that Pyongyang would require significant changes before agreeing to renewed bilateral negotiations, potentially including sanctions relief.
Trump met Kim three times during his first presidential term: in Singapore in 2018, Hanoi in 2019 and at the Korean Demilitarized Zone later in 2019.
Those meetings were unprecedented for a sitting U.S. president but did not produce a lasting agreement on North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme.
The Korean Peninsula technically remains at war because the fighting in the 1950–53 Korean War ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty.
WHAT WE KNOW: No Trump-Kim summit has been announced. The White House says Trump remains open to talks. Reuters reports that North Korea has not responded to current U.S. efforts to arrange a meeting.
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