North Korea Test Fires New Missiles as Speculation Increases About Trump-Kim Meeting in Asia Next Week
The timing suggests the tests were a warning to Trump before he sits down with the leaders of America’s two northeast Asian allies, Japan and South Korea.
North Korea is boasting of the prowess of its latest missiles amid speculation as to whether the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, will meet President Trump next week during the gathering of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group in South Korea.
The secretary of the central committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Pak Jong-chon, said two hypersonic projectiles tested Wednesday were “the new cutting-edge weapon” and “clear proof of steadily upgrading self-defensive capabilities of the DPRK” — the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, in a dispatch in English, said “the DPRK’s activities” were “evidently aimed to continue to bolster up the war deterrent” in order “to strengthen self-defense.”
The timing suggests the tests were a warning to Mr. Trump before he sits down with the leaders of America’s two northeast Asian allies, Japan and South Korea, and possibly China’s president, Xi Jinping, before or during the APEC confab.
Mr. Trump, after attending the gathering of leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday and Monday, flies to Tokyo to see Japan’s new prime minister, Sanai Takaichi, on Tuesday, winding up in the ancient South Korean city of Gyeongju before the APEC conference begins next Friday.
It’s not totally certain he will have more than a polite exchange with Mr. Xi and even less certain he will see Mr. Kim, with whom he bonded during their three previous meetings.
If Messrs. Trump and Kim do meet, it will most likely be at the truce village of Panmunjom, on the North-South Korean line, where they met in June 2019 in an unsuccessful attempt at coming to terms after the failure of their summit in Hanoi four months later. At stake is the North’s refusal to abandon its nuclear program, but Mr. Trump might get through to Mr. Kim by focusing on steps toward reconciliation, avoiding the usual demand for North Korea to give up its nukes.
Vague hints have raised the longshot odds of a Trump-Kim rendezvous, if not a full-scale summit. One is that Mr. Kim did not make a show of attending the latest missile tests. Often, in the past, sometimes accompanied by his tween-aged daughter, Ju-ae, he has pressed the button on such tests.
