U.S. Experts: "Less Than 10% Chance of U.S.-North Korea Summit on Sidelines of November APEC Summit"

"Trump Should Send an Official Message to North Korea in the State of the Union Address"

U.S. experts say a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on the sidelines of next month’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in China is unlikely.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks at the commissioning ceremony for the destroyer Kang Kon. Yonhap News Agency

Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said on a podcast hosted by Victor Cha, the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), on October 22 local time that he put the chances of a U.S.-North Korea summit being held on the sidelines of APEC at “probably less than 10%.” He said it was already late October and predicted that after the U.S. midterm elections in early November, President Trump’s attention would shift to other issues.

Jenny Town, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center who appeared on the podcast with him, also saw little chance of a meeting taking place soon. She said the key question was not whether North Korea was willing to talk, but how prepared the United States was to respond to North Korea’s demands.

Town said North Korea was demanding that the United States ease its hostile policy toward the country and exclude denuclearization from discussions, but that the United States was unlikely to accept those demands in the short term. She explained that North Korea was making conditions it would normally seek to secure through negotiations prerequisites for talks, leaving it with little reason to hurry into a meeting with the United States if those conditions were not met.

Panda suggested that the United States would need to convey its willingness to change its policy in a more formal way to break the deadlock in talks. One possibility would be for President Trump to deliver a message to Kim in his State of the Union address early next year. He mentioned the Joint Security Area (JSA) at Panmunjom, the runway at Pyongyang airport and Beijing, China, as possible venues if a meeting were to take place.

Some analysts also said North Korea’s recent shows of force were intended in part to gauge the U.S. response. Panda said that although North Korea had launched several types of missiles, it had avoided actions that could put President Trump in a difficult position, such as a nuclear test or an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test launch. If North Korea sees that President Trump does not react strongly to its missile launches, it may consider a meeting with the United States more seriously, he said.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.