President-elect Donald Trump’s team is discussing pursuing direct talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, hoping a fresh diplomatic push can lower the risks of armed conflict, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Several in Trump’s team now see a direct approach from Trump, to build on a relationship that already exists, as most likely to break the ice with Kim, years after the two traded insults and what Trump called “beautiful” letters in an unprecedented diplomatic effort during his first term in office, the people said.

The policy discussions are fluid and no final decisions have been made by the president-elect, the sources said.

Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

What reciprocation Kim will offer Trump is unclear. The North Koreans ignored four years of outreach by U.S. President Joe Biden to start talks with no pre-conditions, and Kim is emboldened by an expanded missile arsenal and a much closer relationship with Russia.

“We have already gone as far as we can on negotiating with the United States,” Kim said last week in a speech at a Pyongyang military exhibition, according to state media.

During his 2017-2021 presidency, Trump held three meetings with Kim, in Singapore, Hanoi, and at the Korean border, the first time a sitting U.S. president had set foot in the country.

Their diplomacy yielded no concrete results, even as Trump described their talks as falling “in love.” The U.S. called for North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons, while Kim demanded full sanctions relief, then issued new threats.

It was not clear what result a new diplomatic effort would yield. An initial Trump goal would be to reestablish basic engagement but further policy aims or a precise timetable have not been set, the people said. And the issue may take a backseat to more pressing foreign policy concerns in the Middle East and Ukraine, according to one person briefed on the transition’s thinking.

North Korean state media have not yet publicly mentioned the re-election of Trump, and Kim said this month that the United States was ramping up tension and provocations, raising the risks of nuclear war.

Trump and some of his allies left office with the impression that the direct approach was Washington’s best shot at influencing behavior north of the demilitarized zone, which has divided the Korean Peninsula for seven decades. The countries’ war was never technically ended even as the guns fell silent.

On Friday, Trump named one of the people who implemented that initial North Korea strategy, former State Department official Alex Wong, as his deputy national security adviser. “As Deputy Special Representative for North Korea, he helped negotiate my Summit with North Korean Leader, Kim Jong Un,” Trump said in a statement.

TENSIONS RISE

Trump inherits an increasingly tense situation with Kim when he returns to the White House in January, as he did in 2017, an atmosphere allies expect the incoming president to confront head-on.

“My experience with President Trump is he’s much more likely to be open to direct engagement,” said U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty, a Trump ally, in an interview with Reuters earlier this year. “I’m optimistic that we can see an improvement in the relationship and perhaps a different posture adopted by Kim Jong Un if that dialogue were reopened again.”

Washington has a dossier of concerns over the country’s expanding nuclear weapons and missile program, its increasingly hostile rhetoric to South Korea and its close collaboration with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

These topics are expected to feature in Biden administration transition briefings for Trump aides, according to a U.S. official. The Trump team has yet to sign transition agreements, which could limit the scope of some of these briefings.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Particularly concerning to Washington are the prospects of increased sharing of nuclear or missile technology between Russia and North Korea and the deployment of thousands of North Korean troops to Russia to help in the war with Ukraine.

Reuters reported on Monday that North Korea is expanding a key weapons manufacturing complex that assembles a type of short-range missile used by Russia in Ukraine, citing researchers at a U.S.-based think tank who examined satellite images.

U.S. officials said those factors raise the risk of a conflict between multiple nuclear armed nations in Europe or Asia, including the United States and its allies, which include South Korea and Japan.

American troops are deployed throughout the region to deter North Korea, and Trump has insisted that U.S. allies share more of the cost for those deployments.

In his final meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping earlier this month in Peru, Biden asked for Beijing to use its leverage to reel in North Korea.

Opportunity for China and the U.S. to work together may be limited as Trump vows vast tariffs on Chinese goods and stacks his inner circle with China hardliners, such as Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Representative Mike Waltz as national security adviser.

Trump said last month the two countries would have had “a nuclear war with millions of people killed,” but that he had stopped it, thanks to his ties with the North’s leader.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Members of Nihon Hidankyo, a grassroots Japanese organization of atomic bomb survivors, that won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, attend a press conference on October 12, 2024, in Tokyo, Japan.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images

Leaders of the group of atomic bomb survivors awarded the Nobel Peace Prize warned on Saturday (October 12, 2024) that the risk of nuclear war was rising, renewing their call to abolish nuclear weapons.

“The international situation is getting progressively worse, and now wars are being waged as countries threaten the use of nuclear weapons,” said Shigemitsu Tanaka, a survivor of the 1945 U.S. bombing of Nagasaki and co-head of the Nihon Hidankyo group.

“I fear that we as humankind are on the path to self-destruction. The only way to stop that is to abolish nuclear,” he said.

In awarding the survivors, the Norwegian Nobel Committee highlighted the devastation of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese group’s decades-long work to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

The group’s endeavours have critical importance in the world today, the committee said. It did not specify any countries.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signalled last month that Moscow would consider responding with nuclear weapons if the U.S. and its allies allow Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia with long-range Western missiles.

Stockholm:

The role of atomic weapons has become more prominent and nuclear states are modernising arsenals as geopolitical relations deteriorate, researchers said Monday, urging world leaders to “step back and reflect”.

Diplomatic efforts to control nuclear arms also suffered major setbacks amid strained international relations over the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said in its annual yearbook.

“We have not seen nuclear weapons playing such a prominent role in international relations since the Cold War,” Wilfred Wan, director of SIPRI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programme, said in a statement.

The research institute noted that in February 2023 Russia announced it was suspending participation in the 2010 New START treaty — “the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty limiting Russian and US strategic nuclear forces”.

SIPRI also noted that Russia carried out tactical nuclear weapon drills close to the Ukrainian border in May.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has upped his nuclear rhetoric since the Ukraine conflict began, warning in his address to the nation in February there was a “real” risk of nuclear war.

In addition, an informal agreement between the United States and Iran reached in June 2023 was upended after the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October, SIPRI said.

– ‘Extremely concerning’ –

According to SIPRI, the world’s nine nuclear-armed states also “continued to modernise their nuclear arsenals and several deployed new nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable weapon systems in 2023”.

The nine countries are the United States, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.

In January, of the estimated 12,121 nuclear warheads around the world about 9,585 were in stockpiles for potential use, according to SIPRI.

Around 2,100 were kept in a state of “high operational alert” on ballistic missiles.

Nearly all of these warheads belong to Russia and the United States — which together possess almost 90 percent of all nuclear weapons — but China was for the first time believed to have some warheads on high operational alert.

“While the global total of nuclear warheads continues to fall as Cold War-era weapons are gradually dismantled, regrettably we continue to see year-on-year increases in the number of operational nuclear warheads,” SIPRI director Dan Smith said.

He added that this trend would likely continue and “probably accelerate” in the coming years, describing it as “extremely concerning.”

Researchers also stressed the “continuing deterioration of global security over the past year”, as the impact from the wars in Ukraine and Gaza could be seen in “almost every aspect” of issues relating to armaments and international security.

“We are now in one of the most dangerous periods in human history,” Smith said, urging the world’s great powers to “step back and reflect. Preferably together.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)