South Korean President Lee Jae-myung and U.S. President Donald Trump agreed to work closely to help restore dialogue with North Korea, with Trump once again expressing his willingness to engage in talks with Kim Jong Un. Bloomberg reports, according to UNN.
Details
Both leaders said they would maintain close contact as they worked to resume negotiations with Pyongyang and establish lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula, South Korean National Security Adviser Wi Sung-lac said. According to him, Lee and Trump met for approximately 30 minutes in New York on Tuesday evening.
The agreement was reached after Lee called in his address to the UN General Assembly for the swiftest possible resumption of talks between the United States and North Korea, seeking to leverage Trump's relationship with Kim to overcome the peninsula's years-long deadlock.
Calling Trump the person who created a "hard-to-reach opportunity for change," Lee said that South Korea would lay the groundwork for holding new talks "as soon as possible."
Trump, who met with Kim several times during his first presidential term but ultimately failed to reach a deal, has repeatedly said that he is ready to speak with the North Korean leader again. Kim has so far rejected these proposals.
Lee said that South Korea would work to turn any renewed talks between the United States and North Korea into full-fledged negotiations aimed at officially ending the Korean War and establishing peace. South Korea is formally still at war with nuclear-armed North Korea, as the 1950–1953 conflict ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty.
Lee outlined a new approach under which North Korea would first halt the expansion of its nuclear and missile capabilities, then reduce them in the medium term, and ultimately move toward a denuclearized Korean Peninsula in the long term. This represents a departure from the demand that Kim immediately give up his nuclear weapons—a strategy that led to the failure of Trump's last substantive talks with Kim in Vietnam in 2019.
Supplement
Despite numerous UN sanctions, North Korea is now capable of producing enough weapons-grade nuclear material to create up to 20 nuclear warheads per year, Lee said in January. Kim's regime, which has declared itself a nuclear state, is now less isolated than at any time in recent decades. This is evidenced, among other things, by the mutual defense treaty concluded with Russia in 2024, under which North Korea is helping Moscow in its war against Ukraine.
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