Trump reveals location for US-North Korean summit narrowed to two or three locations

'I don’t think he’s playing'

Donald Trump has revealed the location for a forthcoming summit between himself and Kim Jong-un has been narrowed to just two or three locations.

Speaking just hours after the leaders of North and South Korea made history in their own meeting during which Mr Kim became the first North Korean leader to visit south of the demarcation line between the two Koreas, the US leader said he looking forward to his own planned summit.

“I don’t think he’s playing,” Mr Trump said of Mr Kim, speaking to reporters at the beginning of a meeting in the Oval Office with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “We will, I think, come up with a solution and if we don’t we leave the room with great respect and we just keep it going.”

He added: “A lot of very positive things happened over the last 24 hours. We’ll be setting up a meeting very shortly. We have it broken down to probably two sites now, two or three sites, locations. And hopefully we’re going to have great success.”

In scenes that could barely have been dreamed of just a few months ago when there were genuine fears about the prospect of fresh military conflict on the Korean peninsula, Mr Kim and his South Korean counterpart, Moon Jae-in, shook hands and laughed, before holding private talks.

They later pledged in a joint statement to seek a formal end to the Korean War by the end of the year and rid their peninsula of nuclear weapons, without specifying how it would be achieved.

Mr Trump, who many experts have given a degree of credit in helping persuade North Korea to return to the negotiating table with a combination of tough sanctions and equally tough sabre-rattling, was quick to wrap his arms around developments.

“When I began, people were saying that was an impossibility,” Mr Trump said during an appearance with US athletes who participated in this year’s Winter Olympics in South Korea. “They said there were two alternatives: Let them have what they have, or go to war. And now we have a much better alternative than anybody thought even possible.”

The Kim-Moon meeting was the culmination of a rapprochement that was inspired by the February games.

The Associated Press said Mr Trump gave an unequivocal statement that he would sit down with Mr Kim, a meeting that has been tentatively scheduled for May or early June and which would represent a first during six decades of hostility.

“I’ll be meeting with Kim Jong Un in the coming weeks as we seek to denuclearise the North Korean area and the entire Korean Peninsula,” Mr Trump said.

“Hopefully the day will come when Olympic athletes can compete on a Korean peninsula that is free of nuclear weapons and where all Koreans can live together and can share their dreams. It would be a wonderful thing to do.”