Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly at New York, Lee said that U.S. President Donald Trump’s resolve for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was “a hard won opportunity for change,” and said he hopes that the “long suspended dialogue” between Pyongyang and Washington would resume.
Trump has said he has plans to meet Kim “later this year.”
It was not clear if any meeting was actually planned. Kim Yo Jong, the sister of Kim Jong Un, said that she was not aware of any communication between the two leaders.
Trump met Kim three times in his first term, including in Singapore and Vietnam, but did not appear to make any headway at denuclearization.
“We will lay the groundwork for this to develop into a dialogue among the parties aimed at ending the war on the Korean Peninsula and transitioning to a peace regime,” Lee said in his speech.
North and South Korea are still formally at war, as the Korean War stopped in 1953 with a armistice and not a peace treaty.
As part of this process, he said, Seoul aims for a stop to further advances in North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities.
This would be then followed by a reduction in such capabilities in the North in the medium term, before “moving toward [a] Korean Peninsula free from nuclear weapons over the long term.”
In a later summit with Trump on the sidelines of the UNGA, Lee had reportedly discussed the strategic investment projects between the two countries. Seoul, under its trade deal struck with Washington last year, had committed to invest $350 billion into the U.S.
The summit also reportedly saw the two leaders vow to deepen cooperation in areas such as nuclear submarine fuel, reprocessing, shipbuilding collaboration, and wartime operational control transition, according to national security adviser Wi Sung-lac.
Wi told South Korean media, “President Trump also reaffirmed his willingness to engage in dialogue with North Korea.”
However, the goal of denuclearizing Pyongyang may be hard to achieve, as Kim Yo Jong had said in a statement last week Pyongyang’s nuclear status was “absolute.”
“If they believe that it [denuclearization] is really possible, they will be termed idiots knowing nothing of the world,” she said. Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal “makes a significant contribution to deterring the outrageous acts of international rogues.”
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