With Trump’s Asia trip, speculation mounts of a meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un

SEOUL, South Korea – When US President Donald Trump last met with North Korea’s leader, Mr Kim Jong Un, it took only about 36 hours to arrange a hurried but made-for-TV encounter between the two men on the border between North and South Korea.

More than six years after those talks, Mr Trump is headed back to South Korea this week, and speculation has flared over whether he and Mr Kim will meet again.

Mr Trump is scheduled to arrive in the South on Oct 29 for bilateral summits with its president, Mr Lee Jae Myung, and the Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in the city of Gyeongju.

Mr Trump, who met Mr Kim three times in 2018 and 2019, has

repeatedly said that he would like to see Mr Kim again

, boasting of their “great relationship”.

As he boarded Air Force One on Oct 24, he said again that he would like to meet Mr Kim.

“I would,” he told reporters. “If you want to put out the word, I’m open to it.”

In 2019, Mr Trump was visiting Japan when he tweeted: “If chairman Kim of North Korea sees this, I would meet him at the border/DMZ just to shake his hand and say Hello(?)!”

The two met the next day in Panmunjom, a truce village that lies inside the DMZ, or Demilitarized Zone, that separates the two Koreas.

A senior White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said there were no current plans for the two leaders to meet.

North Korea has not responded to Mr Trump’s latest overture. But on Oct 26, it said that its foreign minister, Ms Choe Son Hui, was embarking on a trip to Russia and Belarus.

In September, Mr Kim said he had “a good memory” of Mr Trump. But he said North Korea would re-enter negotiations with Washington only if it stopped insisting on his country’s denuclearisation.

“Well, I think they are sort of a nuclear power,” Mr Trump said on Oct 24.

Mr Trump is eager to portray himself as a global peacemaker, but it is unclear whether Washington and Pyongyang have an open line of communication.

On Oct 24, Mr Trump hinted at the difficulty in reaching the North Koreans.

“They have a lot of nuclear weapons but not a lot of telephone service,” he said.

During Mr Trump’s first term, South Korea had served as an eager mediator, helping arrange the first summit meeting between Mr Kim and Mr Trump, in Singapore in 2018.

When he last met Mr Kim in Panmunjom in June 2019, Mr Trump briefly crossed the inter-Korean border line, becoming the first American leader to set foot on North Korean soil.

But that meeting also failed to produce a deal on rolling back North Korea’s nuclear programme or lifting sanctions imposed on the country.

Relations between the two Koreas have since deteriorated so badly that a top official in the South has said there is little it can do to help facilitate dialogue between Pyongyang and Washington.

When Mr Lee met Mr Trump in Washington in August, he called the US President “the only person that can make progress on this issue”.

Speculation about a possible Trump-Kim meeting gained more currency after a South Korean minister said on Oct 24 that North Korean troops were cleaning their side of Panmunjom.

The American-led United Nations Command, which controls the southern half of the village, has decided not to accept any tourists there in the coming days. It said it would not comment on “any hypothetical scenarios”.

South Korean officials said they had not seen logistical moves for a meeting there.

But they also would not rule out the possibility, given the peculiar dynamics between Mr Trump and Mr Kim.

In recent years, the North Korean leader has expanded the country’s nuclear arsenal and

deepened ties with Russia and China

. He now has more leverage than he did in 2019.

“Time is on our side,” Mr Kim said in September. NYTIMES