Thread: South Korea says there's a '99.9 per cent chance' that summit between Trump and Kim W

South Korea says there's a '99.9 per cent chance' that summit between Trump and Kim WILL take place

By Francesca Chambers, White House Correspondent For Dailymail.com and Ariel Zilber For Dailymail.com

Published: 02:00 EDT, 22 May 2018 | Updated: 02:03 EDT, 22 May 2018

Trump is considering backing out the summit over the increasing likelihood that scheduled talks will turn into an embarrassment for him

Kim Jong-un is demanding concessions and threatening not to go to Singapore on June 12 for planned talks

Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin told DailyMail.com on Monday morning that for now the summit is still on

'I don't think the president gets cold feet about anything,' Mnuchin said

There is a '99.9 per cent chance' that the historic summit meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean ruler Kim Jong-un will take place as planned, a top South Korean official said on Tuesday.

Chung Eui-yong, a senior national security adviser to President Moon Jae-in, made the remarks to Korean reporters aboard a flight to Washington.

Moon is set to meet Trump at the White House later on Tuesday, according to the Korean Yonhap News Agency.

'We believe there is a 99.9 per cent chance the North Korea-U.S. summit (set for June 12 in Singapore) will be held as scheduled,' Chung told reporters.

'But we're just preparing for many different possibilities.'

There appeared to be less likelihood that the summit will take place due to developments on the Korean Peninsula as well as in Washington these past few days.

North Korea angrily denounced a joint U.S.-South Korean military exercise that was planned in advance. It has threatened to pull out of the summit after canceling talks with South Korean officials in protest of the exercises.
Chung Eui-yong, a senior national security adviser to President Moon Jae-in, says there's a '99.9 per cent chance' of a summit taking place between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un of North Korea

'We're trying to understand the situation from the North's perspective,' Chung told reporters.

Chung said that Moon and Trump will have 'candid discussions on how to make the North-U.S. summit a success and produce significant agreements and how to best implement those agreements.

'South Korea and the U.S. have been sharing every bit of information and have remained in close coordination with each other," Chung added.

'We've had various working-level discussions on how to steer North Korea in a direction that we want, and I expect (Moon and Trump) will have great talks this time.'

Trump on Monday was considering backing out of the summit with North Korea over the increasing likelihood that scheduled talks will turn into an embarrassment for him.

Trump is said to have been weighing the way forward privately, surveying aides and discussing the optics of Kim's own threats to cancel the June 12 meeting with South Korea's Moon Jae-in, according to the New York Times.

The South Koreans, for their part, said they did not detect any hesitation from Trump.

'During phone calls between our two leaders or talks between our National Security Councils, I never got such an impression,' Chung said.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told DailyMail.com on Monday morning that for now the summit is still on.

'I don't think the president gets cold feet about anything, so I think as the president has said, right now it's still on, if that changes, you'll find out about it,' he said in response to reports that Trump is the one who could back down.

Kim has been taunting the U.S. since last week over annual military exercises on the Korean Peninsula that are conducted in conjunction with South Korea.

The joint exercises were a condition of talks, however the North is now using them as a cudgel.

The isolated regime also took issue with past statements that Trump's new national security adviser, John Bolton, about denuclearization, leading the U.S. president to provide assurances last week that Kim would not be ousted if he abandons his nuclear weapons program.

Trump told reporters on Wednesday as the news made its way to the White House that North Korea had not notified the United States of an intent to call off the summit nor had it iterated the demands that appeared in state-run media directly to the administration.

Asked if the summit would move forward, he said, 'We'll have to see.'

The president said then that he would not budge on denuclearization of the peninsula.

'If the meeting happens, it happens and if it doesn't we go onto the next step,' he said Thursday. 'Our people are literally dealing with them right now in terms of making arrangements.'

The two spoke on the phone over the weekend, as well.

The president is said to have pressed Moon in the call on North Korea's comments in public that the summit may not happen and Pyongyang's commitments privately that Kim will attend the summit in Singapore.

Asked Thursday if Kim is now the one in the driver's seat on the summit, Trump's spokeswoman said he's certainly not.

'Nothing could be further from the truth,' Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.

'But they’re the ones that extended the invitation; we’ve accepted it. If they want to meet, we’re happy to do that. If they don’t, as the President has said, we’ll see what happens. But we’re going to continue the maximum pressure campaign in the meantime.'

President Trump said Thursday that 'nothing has changed' in terms of a summit.

If the meeting doesn't get cancelled, he said, 'I think that we'll probably have a very successful meeting.'

'My attitude is whatever happens happens,' Trump said. 'Deals, that's what I do, deals...He absolutely wanted to do it.'

Trump observed that Kim, perhaps, 'spoke with China and changed his mind. The president admitted that Kim's visit to Beijing last week on Tuesday was 'a little bit of a surprise' to the Trump administration.

But he said of the games playing, 'I want to give everybody the benefit of a doubt.'

In her only on-camera briefing with press since North Korea made the threats, Sanders said, 'If the North Koreans want to meet, we’ll be there. And at this point, there is not a lot of change beyond that, and certainly not in our process.'

She told a reporter who asked 'what game' North Korea is at, 'You’d have to ask North Korea what game they’re playing. I can tell you what we’re doing, and we’re continuing to move forward in preparations.'

The White House has publicly remained optimistic that a sit-down will take place between President Trump and Kim, despite a flare-up in hostilities. If doesn't, the U.S. says it will keep its choke hold on North Korea's economy.

North Korea first said that it objected to joint military exercises the U.S. and South Korea were conducting, warning that it would not sit idly by while the countries rehearsed their invasion.

Trump observed that Kim, perhaps, 'spoke with China and changed his mind. The president admitted that Kim's visit to Beijing last week on Tuesday was 'a little bit of a surprise' to the Trump administration.

But he said of the games playing, 'I want to give everybody the benefit of a doubt.'

She told a reporter who asked 'what game' North Korea is at, 'You’d have to ask North Korea what game they’re playing. I can tell you what we’re doing, and we’re continuing to move forward in preparations.'

It then blasted the U.S. for what it called a 'hostile policy, nuclear threats and blackmail' and went after the Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton in a second statement threatening to call off the talks between Trump and Kim.

The deputy foreign affairs minister rejected the United States' terms of nuclear abandonment, shunning the 'complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization' of the Korean Penninsula and the 'total decommissioning of nuclear weapons, missiles, biochemical weapons.'

He explicitly took issue with the U.S. position of 'abandoning nuclear weapons first, compensating afterwards' saying the proposed terms are 'essentially a manifestation of awfully sinister move to impose on our dignified state the destiny of Libya or Iraq which had been collapsed due to yielding the whole of their countries to big powers.'

Trump said he was willing to go 'onto the next step' if Kim backs away from the summit. He also said he was willing to guarantee that Kim would stay in power if he agrees to give up his nuclear ambitions.

'I'm willing to do a lot... He'll have protections,' Trump said. 'The best thing he could do is make a deal.'

Providing assurances to Kim, Trump said that the deal he intends to make with North Korea would keep the dictator in power. He said that Kim wouldn't be ousted like Libya's Muammar Gaddafi was after he voluntarily dismantled his nuclear program in order to normalize relations with the U.S.

'In Libya that deal was decimated. There was no deal to keep Gaddafi,' he said. 'The Libyan model was a much different model. We decimated that country. We never said to Gaddafi, "Oh, we're going to give you protection. We're going to give you military strength. We're going to give you all of these things." We went in and decimated him, and we did the same thing with Iraq.'

With Kim it would be 'something where he'd be there, he'd be running his country. His country would be very rich,' Trump said.

'If we make a deal, I think Kim Jong-un will be very, very happy,' he said.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...Kim-place.html

I hope this works out. It would be nice to end this 70 year war with North Korea with a true peace treaty versus military action.