U. S. President Donald Trump took a historic step into North Korea on Sunday, drawing on his penchant for showmanship and surprise to pull off talks with Kim Jong Un in the Demilitar
ized Zone (DMZ) that divides the two Koreas.
The drama was magnified by the choice of the Panmunjom truce village as the venue for his meeting with Kim, where 66 years ago Americans and North Koreans huddled to draw up the Military Demarcation Line following the bitter 1950-53 war.
"Stepping across that line has been a great honour," Trump said as he sat down with Kim, amid a chaotic scene of U.S. and North Korean reporters jostling to capture the historic moment while secret service agents struggled to contain them.
Earlier in the day, Trump held a meeting and lunched with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the ornate presidential Blue House in Seoul. Then, the two confirmed the meeting with Kim was indeed going to happen.
"President Trump gave big hope to the world through his tweet yesterday," Moon said. "Seeing that tweet, I felt like flowers of hope were blossoming on the Korean peninsula."
Trump tweeted the invitation only on Saturday to Kim to join him as he toured the DMZ, a meeting he had said would probably last only for a couple of minutes for a symbolic handshake across the line.
The spur-of-the-moment idea apparently caught Kim by surprise, but he was quick to reciprocate.
Trump stepped briefly across the concrete barrier that divides the Korean Peninsula before bringing Kim into Freedom House on the southern side for an hour-long meeting.
They agreed to direct officialsto set up teams who will tackle the challenge of overcoming fundamentaldifferences in positions that led to the collapse of their second summit inFebruary in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi.
Trump, who starred in a popular reality television show before he ran for office, kept saying he was not sure whether the meeting would come together, giving reporters travelling with him regular updates while noting logistics and security were difficult.
After Trump came to the DMZ, he got his first look at North Korea from the vantage point of Observation Post Ouellette as flags of the United States, South Korea and the United Nations flapped in the brisk wind.
