The leader of South Korea hopes the White House will help establish a lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula, a task that President Donald Trump seems eager to take on.
President Lee Jae Myung opened his joint White House press conference with ample flattery for Trump and directly asked the president to oversee peace talks between his government and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un.
“I would like to ask for your role in establishing peace on the Korean Peninsula,” Lee told Trump through a translator. “So I look forward to your meeting with Chairman Kim Jong Un, and the construction of Trump Tower in North Korea, and playing golf at your place. I believe he will be waiting for you.”
“When you were in office in your first term, the situation on the Korean Peninsula was stable, but during the short hiatus when you were out of office, North Korea developed further its nuclear missile capabilities, and that led to a deterioration of the situation,” Lee said.
The president reflected at length during the press conference about his mercurial relationship with the North Korean leader.
“Kim Jong Un and I had a very good relationship, as you remember, and still do,” Trump said. “When I came in, I didn’t know him. We had two summits, but we became very friendly — respect, it was great respect,” Trump said. “I’d like to have a meeting. I get along great with him.”
The president laughed openly about the awkwardness of the supreme leader’s first-ever press conference in 2018, which he held alongside Trump after a walk through the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas.
“I saw more guns in that room than I’ve ever seen in my life,” Trump recalled. “I looked at the other side, and it was the same thing, and yet I felt safe. I felt safe because I have a great relationship with Kim Jong Un.”
The president even alluded to continued communications with the North Korean regime, in which they are “talking about things we’re not supposed to talk about.”
Trump, noting that Lee has a “much better” approach to working with North Korea than past South Korean leaders, speculated that he could meet with Kim “in the appropriate future,” possibly as soon as this year.
North Korea has not relented in its forceful opposition to South Korean gestures of peace, inscribing in its constitution that the southern counterpart remains a “hostile state” with which there can be no cooperation.
The Korean People’s Army launched a series of missile tests over the weekend that were interpreted as a clear provocation ahead of the Monday meeting.
Kim Yo Jong, the deputy director of the Workers’ Party of Korea and sister of the supreme leader, has taken a leading role in crafting rhetoric against South Korea and its Western allies in recent months. But the high-powered stateswoman has let one ray of hope remain: the “personal relationship” between her brother and the U.S. president.
“When Kim Yo Jong issued a statement denouncing South Korea, she mentioned the ‘not bad’ relationship between you and Chairman Kim Jong Un,” Lee told Trump. “And I believe that this is a sign that North Korea is waiting. So I hope that you will usher in a new era of peace on the Korean Peninsula.”
The White House previously asserted that it is “still open to dialogue with the [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] leader for achieving the complete denuclearization of the DPRK.”
However, Kim Yo Jong kiboshed any discussion of denuclearization, stating, “If the personal relations between the top leaders of the DPRK and the United States are to serve the purpose of denuclearization, it can be interpreted as nothing but a mockery of the other party.”
One apparent point of disagreement that was not addressed during the White House conference on Monday is whether the two Koreas remain divided halves of a greater country.
During the conference, Lee referred to the Korean Peninsula as the “only remaining divided nation in the world.” This has been the consistent position of the South Korean government since the cessation of Korean War hostilities in 1953.
Trump was directly asked whether he conceived of the peninsula as a fractured country or two completely separate nations.
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“I know it as two Koreas,” Trump replied. “You had one Korea and it was a very big, powerful nation … Now you have two big, powerful nations, but you have essentially a wall in between.”
The North Korean regime previously assented to the idea that there is only “one Korea” divided by political differences, but made its sharp pivot against reunification in 2023.