A day before leaving for a second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, President Donald Trump on Sunday once more publicly urged the Pyongyang regime to accept a plan to give up the country’s nuclear weapons arsenal, arguing such a move would guarantee a path to economic prosperity for the future.
"Chairman Kim realizes, perhaps better than anyone else, that without nuclear weapons, his country could fast become one of the great economic powers anywhere in the World," the President wrote in a series of posts on Twitter.
"As part of a bold new diplomacy, we continue our historic push for peace on the Korean Peninsula," the President said as part of a White House push in the days before the second Trump-Kim meeting.
"This summit aims to make further progress on the commitments the two leaders made in Singapore: transformed relations, a lasting and stable peace, and the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," the White House stated in a release to reporters.
It's unclear what this second meeting between the two leaders will produce - the first Trump-Kim summit, last June in Singapore, brought about a promise by North Korea to denuclearize, but U.S. Intelligence officials say there has been no evidence that Kim is dismantling his nuclear arsenal.
"North Korean leaders view nuclear arms as critical to regime survival," said Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats at a recent Senate hearing - an observation which reportedly netted him criticism from the President, and rumors that Coats might be on his way out for not expressing a different point of view more in line with the President's.
But the intelligence assessment about Kim and North Korea is shared at all levels of the military, as evidenced by other hearings in Congress in recent weeks:
Asked by reporters last week about the seeming lack of progress with his stated goal of ending the North Korean nuclear program, the President bristled at those suggestions.
"The Singapore (summit) was a tremendous success," Mr. Trump told reporters. "Only the fake news likes to portray it otherwise."
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