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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Trump tells South Korean president he wants to meet North Korea’s Kim
Jong Un
By Jessie Yeung, Gawon Bae, Mitchell McCluskey, CNN
Updated:
4:04 AM EDT, Tue August 26, 2025
Source: CNN
President Donald Trump is willing to meet with North Korean leader Kim
Jong Un, he told his South Korean counterpart during a meeting on
Monday where they discussed peace in the Korean Peninsula and
Pyongyang’s nuclear weapon capabilities.
President Lee Jae Myung, who was elected in June, asked Trump to help
establish peace between the two Koreas during his visit to the White
House – claiming the situation had been more stable during Trump’s
first term in office.
“I think you are the first president to have so much interest in the
world’s peace issues and actually made achievements,” Lee said.
“So, I hope you would make peace on the Korean Peninsula … and meet
with Kim Jong Un.”
He added that he would “actively support” Trump if he wanted to
“play the peacemaker,” and that the US president was “the only
person who can actually solve” tensions between North and South
Korea, who remain technically at war after the Korean War ended in 1953
with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
Lee’s meeting was a major test for South Korea’s new leader at a
time when both Seoul’s trade and military relationships with the US
are facing pressure from Trump’s “America First” policies.
Lee, who took office in June after his predecessor and , travelled with
a bevy of CEOs and business leaders from some of South Korea’s top
firms who announced a slew of investments during the trip.
Korean Air said it intends to purchase 103 aircraft from Boeing, along
with engines and a maintenance program from GE Aerospace and CFM
International, totaling $50 billion, according to a statement.
Meanwhile, Hyundai Motor Group said it would increase its investment in
the United States from a previously planned $21 billion to $26 billion
in a Tuesday statement.
In total South Korean businesses are expected to invest a total of $150
billion in the US, Lee announced during a South Korea-US business round
table that he attended after the summit.
Golf clubs and cowboy hats
Among the bespoke gifts Lee handed Trump were two cowboy hats
embroidered with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign
slogan, a tailor-made golf putter, and a “turtle ship” model.
And in a nod to Trump’s love of golf and various golf properties, Lee
joked that a Trump Tower should be built in North Korea, “so I can go
play golf in Pyongyang as well.”
Trump – whose peacemaking efforts and negotiations with both South
and North Korea had been a – quickly agreed.
“I will do that, and we’ll have talks. He’d like to meet with
me,” Trump said of Kim. “We look forward to meeting with him, and
we’ll make relations better. You’ll help that.”
It’s hard to say whether such a meeting might go ahead. North Korean
state media claimed that joint military drills between the US and South
Korea showed Washington’s intention to “occupy” the Korean
peninsula, Reuters reported Tuesday morning local time in South Korea.
Earlier this and last year, Kim and his powerful sister Kim Yo Jong had
stepped up their rhetoric, vowing to maintain North Korea’s nuclear
arsenal and to destroy South Korea with nuclear weapons if Pyongyang is
attacked.
North Korea is now able to produce 10 to 20 nuclear weapons per year as
the country has expanded its capabilities, Lee said on Monday after his
meeting with Trump, without providing evidence.
That figure is “higher than normally assumed so (it) probably implies
additional uranium enrichment capacity” in North Korea, said Hans
Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the
Federation of American Scientists.
On Saturday, just two days before the summit between Trump and Lee,
North Korea test launched two new air defense missiles, according to
state media KCNA. And Kim – and – are now bolstered by burgeoning
ties with Moscow, with North Korean troops sent to fight for Russia in
its war against Ukraine.
Previous Trump meetings with Kim
It wouldn’t be the first time Trump met Kim – someone he boasts of
having a “very good relationship” with. “He was very good with me
… We got along great,” he said on Monday, claiming to know Kim
“better than anybody, almost.”
It wasn’t always this way. There was a period of serious tensions in
2017, when North Korea escalated its provocations with missile tests
– and Trump responded with tweets taunting Kim as and threatening to
respond with like the world has never seen.”
But those tensions cooled as the two became pen pals, exchanging what
Trump has described as that ultimately led to a series of unprecedented
meetings between the two leaders in 2018 and 2019.
During one meeting in the , in a remarkable moment, Kim invited Trump
to step over the border into North Korea – making him the first
sitting US president to enter the highly isolated autocratic nation.
But the talks ended , wrapping up abruptly in Hanoi in 2019 – and
efforts at denuclearization or peace negotiations fizzled out
afterward.
Pyongyang has since refused to reengage with the US, experts say, and
restarted weapons testing it had appeared to pause alongside that
dialogue. While it has yet to initiate a nuclear test since 2017, Kim
has since vowed to increase the country’s number of
Speaking at an event hosted by Washington-based think tank Center for
Strategic and International Studies, South Korea’s Lee warned that
the number of North Korea’s nuclear weapons has increased 2.5 times
in just the last few years.
The nation is now in the “final stages” of developing
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that “can target far away
distances,” he said, adding: “The situation is deteriorating.”
And at a congressional hearing earlier this year, Army Gen. Xavier T.
Brunson testified that the US expects North Korea to make progress this
year in other parts of its weapons program.
“In the coming year, we expect (North Korea) to further develop
hypersonic and multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicle
capabilities to complete (their government’s) goals,” Brunson said.
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