US President Donald Trump has said that he may meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during his planned trip to Asia.
“I may, yeah. That'll be exciting, won't it? But I get along with him,” he said, speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday.
A meeting would mark a potential new chapter in Trump’s efforts to engage directly with Kim, with whom he held several historic meetings during his first term as president as the two leaders sought to address North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
Trump will travel to the Philippines for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit on November 16, then head to Shenzhen, China, for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit from November 17–19.
Trump and Kim Jong-un first met on June 12, 2018, at the Singapore Summit.
The historic encounter took place at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa Island, marking the first-ever meeting between a sitting US president and a North Korean leader.
The two leaders shook hands, held private talks, and signed a joint statement committing to work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, establish new US-DPRK relations, and pursue a lasting peace regime.
The summit followed months of heightened tensions, missile tests, and public threats in 2017, before both sides agreed to direct talks earlier in 2018.
It produced no binding denuclearisation deal but was widely described as a breakthrough in personal diplomacy that led to two more meetings in 2019.
In February 2019, Trump and Kim held their second summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, but the talks collapsed abruptly after the two leaders failed to bridge gaps over sanctions relief and North Korea’s nuclear programme.
Four months later, on June 30, 2019, they met for a third time at the DMZ in Panmunjom, where Trump briefly stepped onto North Korean soil — the first sitting US president to do so — and the pair agreed to restart stalled negotiations.
Trump’s latest statement comes a day after North Korea's launch of multiple ballistic missiles towards the East Sea.
The South Korean military confirmed the launch appeared to respond to South Korea's successful test of a hypersonic glide vehicle last week.
South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) detected the launches originating from the Pyongyang region.
