Trump and Kim hold historic first summit in Singapore
The US president and North Korean leader met face to face for the first time, signing a brief declaration on denuclearisation that left the hardest questions for later.
US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met in Singapore on Tuesday for the first summit ever held between sitting leaders of the two countries, a moment that would have seemed unthinkable only a year earlier, when the pair were trading threats of nuclear war.
The two men shook hands before a row of American and North Korean flags on Sentosa Island, then held talks that stretched through the morning. Afterwards they signed a short joint statement in which Pyongyang committed to "work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula" and Washington offered unspecified security guarantees.
Critics noted that the document was thin on detail. It set no timeline, no definition of denuclearisation and no mechanism for verification — all issues that had sunk previous agreements with North Korea. Trump nonetheless hailed the meeting as a breakthrough and announced that the United States would suspend large-scale military exercises with South Korea, a concession that caught allies off guard.
For Kim, the summit was a victory in itself. Sharing a stage as an equal with an American president conferred a legitimacy his family had sought for decades. South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who had spent months brokering the thaw, welcomed the talks as the start of "a new era of peace".
Analysts cautioned that the real test would come in the negotiations that followed, where the gap between the two sides on what denuclearisation actually meant remained vast. But for one day at least, the imagery of handshakes replaced the imagery of missile tests, and both leaders left claiming success.