Analyst: US-NKorea Summit Unlikely Even if Trump Wins

Another summit between the United States and North Korea is unlikely even if former President Donald Trump wins November’s election, a U.S. analyst based in South Korea said Thursday.

Trump in June 2019 became the first sitting U.S. president to visit North Korea since the 1953 armistice that divided the peninsula. He met with the communist nation’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, for the third time, having previosly met with him in Singapore and Hanoi, Vietnam.

Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in November, has since boasted he “developed a very, very good relationship” with Kim.

“North Korea have finally changed their focus away from thinking that they can make a deal with any individual American president, and so they’re going in a different direction,” said Scott Snyder, a senior fellow for Korea Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, at a forum organized by the Sejong Institute in Seoul, The Korea Times reported.

In December, Politico reported that Trump was considering a plan to let North Korea keep its nuclear weapons and offer its regime financial incentives to stop making new bombs. It would mark a sharp departure from his previous stances on the issue.

Snyder said circumstances have changed in South Korea since Trump was president, with the election of the more conservative government of Yoon Suk Yeol, who is unlikely to facilitate Trump’s efforts to directly engage with Kim.

During the Biden administration, North Korea has ramped up weapons tests by launching ballistic and cruise missiles from land and sea and by firing artillery near the western sea border with South Korea.