North Korean officials reportedly rejected a letter from U.S. President Donald Trump intended to open the door for dialogue with North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un.
Newsweek reached out to the White House and North Korean embassy in China with an emailed request for comment outside of office hours.
Why It Matters
During his first administration, Trump maintained a personal correspondence with Kim, saying he “fell in love” after receiving “beautiful letters” from the North Korean ruler.
The pair met three times, for a photo op on the North Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone and two summits where Trump sought to persuade Kim to scale back his nuclear arsenal. The collapse of those talks was followed by a chill in bilateral ties and sharp escalation in tensions between the North and U.S.-allied South.
What To Know
Trump recently penned a letter addressed to Kim in an effort to resume dialogue, North Korea-focused analysis site NK News reported, citing an “informed high-level source” familiar with the matter.
Multiple in-person attempts to deliver the letter were rebuffed, however, by North Korean diplomats based at the United Nations headquarters in New York, the source said.
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt declined to comment on the specifics of the alleged letter. “I’ll leave that to the president to answer,” she told reporters Wednesday.
This photo shared by state media shows North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un observing a Korean People’s Army tactical exercise on May 13. This photo shared by state media shows North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un observing a Korean People’s Army tactical exercise on May 13. Korean Central News Agency
Leavitt said the U.S. hoped to build on “progress” made during the first summit with Kim, held in Singapore in 2018, and that Trump “remains receptive to correspondence with Kim Jong Un.”
Newly elected South Korean President Lee Jae-myung appears to be making early attempts to de-escalate tensions with the North. On Wednesday, he shut down the loudspeakers that for the past year had been broadcasting daily anti-North propaganda near the border.
North Korea appeared to follow suit Thursday, with its own loudspeaker broadcasts falling silent, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
Kim has vowed never to give up North Korea’s nuclear weapons arsenal, calling it necessary to deter aggression by the U.S. and its allies. In 2023, the country’s rubber-stamp legislature enshrined this capability in its constitution.
What People Have Said
Peter Ward, a North Korea economy specialist at the South’s Sejong Institire, a Seongnam think tank, told NK News: “Last time around, the White House was very candid to put it mildly.
“They released a lot of info, including the letters themselves, and Trump freely talked to journalists about his interactions with Kim. The North Koreans might be reluctant to leave a paper trail this time.”
Ankit Panda, a nuclear policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Newsweek in February: “Right now, if we take Kim at his word, he has no interest in entering any room with the United States […]
“That said, it would be useful for the new administration to call Kim’s bluff by fundamentally changing the terms of an invitation to talk: this would mean that the president could communicate that talks would not be about Kim relinquishing his nuclear weapons, but about forging a new type of relationship between the United States and North Korea.”
What’s Next
It’s unclear where reengagement with Kim ranks on Trump’s priority list and what—if any—preconditions either leader would set for new talks.
For now, ending Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine remains a top priority for the White House. North Korea is also involved in that conflict—having lent the Kremlin thousands of troops to help suppress a Ukrainian counteroffensive in Russia’s Kursk region.
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