Christine Drews Sieger
Donald Trump is seeking to arrange a new summit with Kim Jong Un during an upcoming trip to Asia, aiming to restart direct diplomatic talks on North Korea’s growing nuclear capabilities.
Donald Trump is pressing his advisers to organize a fresh face-to-face summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The push aims for a meeting as soon as November.
According to the Wall Street Journal, cited by Express, the American president wants to sit down with Kim during a planned journey to Asia.
Officials suggest the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen could serve as the backdrop.
This diplomatic effort signals a renewed bid to revive early goals regarding North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. A White House insider noted that Trump hopes to restart direct dialogue soon.
Tensions and past encounters
Relations between the two men were not always warm. Back in 2017, Trump warned that North Korea would be “met with fire” and publicly referred to Kim as “little rocket man”.
Kim quickly responded by calling Trump a “mentally deranged US dotard” and threatened military action.
Later at the UN General Assembly, Trump declared that “rocket man is on a suicide mission”.
Despite the harsh insults, the two leaders eventually met three times during Trump’s first presidency.
Their initial 2018 encounter in Singapore produced a broad agreement on denuclearization.
The Vietnam summit turned into a failure, as the parties could not agree at all on whether sanction relief should be linked to disarmament, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Strategic military shifts
As a gesture of goodwill, the US has significantly scaled back joint military exercises with South Korea—a decision Trump has openly justified by pointing to his good personal relationship with Kim.
Meanwhile, Pyongyang has ordered a ramp-up in its nuclear capabilities to counter perceived adversaries.
Experts warn that the region remains volatile as both sides maneuver.
Whether another high-level sitdown happens during the autumn Asia trip remains uncertain.
For now, aides are quietly working to see if the two leaders can meet once more, the Wall Street Journal reports.
A Growing Nuclear Threat?
North Korea’s nuclear arsenal has grown significantly since the first Trump-Kim summit in 2018.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), North Korea is estimated to have around 60 nuclear warheads as of early 2026, while also possessing enough fissile material to potentially produce more.
SIPRI notes, however, that there is considerable uncertainty surrounding the size of North Korea’s arsenal because Pyongyang does not disclose information about its nuclear weapons.
This development could make any renewed attempt to negotiate denuclearization significantly more difficult than in 2018, when North Korea agreed to work toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
