SEOUL: South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said on Friday that US President Donald Trump clearly wants dialogue with Pyongyang and confirmed Seoul will not be deploying troops to intervene militarily in the Iran war.<\/p>\n
Trump, seeking to revive the bond he claims to have forged with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his first term, said last month that he plans to meet Kim later this year.<\/p>\n
The US president also said it was important to \u201cget along\u201d with Kim, adding that Pyongyang now had 57 \u201cvery powerful\u201d nuclear weapons. Seoul says there are around 80-120.<\/p>\n
North Korea, which has secured critical backing from Russia in recent years, did not clearly respond to Trump\u2019s overtures.<\/p>\n
Lee said Friday it was \u201cclear\u201d that \u201cTrump wants dialogue, and I am also urging President Trump to engage in dialogue.\u201d<\/p>\n
South Korea — which Pyongyang has repeatedly labelled as its enemy — was continuing \u201cpreliminary coordination efforts\u201d to facilitate dialogue between North Korea and the United States, Lee told reporters at the presidential Blue House.<\/p>\n
He added that such a meeting \u201cremains difficult, … but is not impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI cannot say for certain how likely it is, but it is also clear that we must make every possible effort to turn that possibility into reality,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Lee\u2019s comment came hours after the North Korean leader\u2019s powerful sister accused the United States of escalating regional tensions through frequent military drills and warned of a \u201cmore offensive\u201d response from Pyongyang.<\/p>\n
A day before, Kim Yo Jong said only \u2018idiots\u2019 think North Korea will give up its nukes.<\/p>\n
Korea and the United States last month held a shorter edition of their annual Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercises, following an order from Trump to scale them back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SEOUL: South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said on Friday that US President Donald Trump clearly wants dialogue with Pyongyang and confirmed Seoul will not be deploying troops to intervene militarily in the Iran war. Trump, seeking to revive the bond he claims to have forged with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":103144,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103133"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103149,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103133\/revisions\/103149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}