President Trump may meet a leader he has referred to as his bosom friend, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, for the fourth time during the gathering of leaders of the 21 member states of the Asia Pacific Economic Policy group next month in South Korea.

A noted North Korea analyst, Victor Cha, is holding out that possibility after Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency reported that Mr. Kim, during a speech at Pyongyang, said there was “no reason for us not to sit down with the United States.” 

The catch, of course, is that Mr. Kim warned Mr. Trump against any illusions about North Korea giving up its nuclear weapons. Although he has “a good memory” of their meetings, Mr. Kim is conditioning another on Washington dropping “its hollow obsession with denuclearization.”

Mr. Cha, who directs Korean issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he thinks there may be a way around the nuclear impasse. “I don’t necessarily see that as an obstacle,” he told the Sun. “Trump may say denuclearization here in D.C. and then call KJU a nuke power when he meets him.”

The prospect of a meeting between Messrs. Trump and Kim is gaining currency since the president of Communist China, Xi Jinping, confirmed that he would attend the Apec talkfest, to be held on October 31 and November 1 at the southeastern Korean city of Gyeongju, a tourist destination noted for its ancient palaces, temples, and shrines.  

“Trump Open to Meeting Kim Jong-un Without Denuclearization,” a headline in South Korea’s biggest-selling newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, said, speculating that Mr. Trump might see a meeting with Mr. Kim “as diplomatic push ahead of midterms” — a reference to the 2026 congressional elections in which Republican control of Congress will be on the line. 

Both Washington and its South Korean ally have reaffirmed longstanding demands for North Korea’s “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization,” but there may be ways of getting around that policy without giving up CVID as an abstract goal.

South Korea’s left-leaning president, Lee Jae-myung, favors moving toward North-South reconciliation without abandoning the need for CVID. The question, he told the UN General Assembly, “is whether we persist with fruitless attempts towards the ultimate goal or we set more realistic goals and achieve some of them.”

At this stage, however, North Korea is not recognizing South Korea as anything other than an ”enemy state” and refuses contact of any kind, including at the “truce village” of Panmunjom, where Mr. Trump last saw Mr. Kim in an almost impromptu meeting in June 2019. Mr. Lee is all for Mr. Trump bridging the gap. Mr. Trump, hosting Mr. Lee at the White House last month, said he and Mr Kim might even meet “this year.”

Mr. Trump, in his UN speech, said not a word about North Korea — an omission that stands in stark contrast to the drubbing he gave Mr. Kim in his UN speech of eight years ago, in which he called him “rocket man.” Mr. Kim, by ordering nuclear and missile tests, was “on a suicide mission,” he said at the time, warning there might be “no choice but to totally destroy” his country.

Since then North Korea, possibly under pressure from China, has conducted no nuclear tests but has gone on producing nuclear warheads at four different sites and is believed by now to have stockpiled about 100 of them along with intercontinental ballistic missiles needed to send them to distant targets.

Mr. Trump’s omission of North Korea at the UN may show a desire to soften his stance while looking to ease tensions with China, which, along with Russia, not only guarantees the North’s defense but provides most of its oil and half the hungry nation’s food. 

Mr. Trump has often said that he and Mr. Kim “fell in love” during their first summit, in Singapore in June 2018. They have remained on warm terms despite the failure of their second summit in February 2019 in Hanoi, where Mr. Kim flatly refused to give up his nuclear program.

If Mr. Trump does see Mr. Kim again at Panmunjom, it will be an impromptu mission resembling his side trip to the North-South line more than six years ago, when he was in South Korea to see Korea’s then-president, Moon Jae-in. Like Mr. Lee, the leftist Mr. Moon applauded the meeting even though Mr. Kim would have nothing to do with him after having seen him three times previously, including during one summit on the North-South line.