President Donald Trump said the White House would be setting up a meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in the “not too distant future.”
Trump also said he had gotten a “great” letter from Kim, and held it aloft in the Cabinet Room for reporters to see.
The President again griped that his administration doesn’t receive enough credit for bettering relations with Pyongyang, saying that if another person were in office he or she would be overseeing a war in Asia.
“You’d be having a nice, big, fat war in Asia, and it wouldn’t be pleasant,” he said.
Trump said he was in no rush for progress in North Korea and that he was encouraged by the absence of rocket or missile tests. Trump met Kim in Singapore in June 2018 for a historic and unprecedented meeting.
The President’s remarks come one day after Kim’s New Year’s address, in which the North Korean leader warned the US on sanctions.
“I’ll endeavor towards a result that will be welcomed by the international community,” Kim said of the potential second meeting between the two leaders.
North Korea, however, would have “no choice but to defend our country’s sovereignty and supreme interest, and find a new way to settle peace on our peninsula,” he said, if the US “misinterprets our people’s patience, and makes one-sided demands and continues down the path of sanctions and pressure on our republic.”