A photo op or nuclear talks? What Trump wants from a meeting with North Korea’s dictator

August 20, 2026 — 5:30pm

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

Beijing: Not for the first time in his second term, Donald Trump has dangled the prospect of a revived face-to-face meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

The US president repeatedly returned to this theme throughout 2025, at one point telling reporters he hoped talks would eventuate by the end of the year, always invoking his apparent good chemistry and rapport with Kim.

There is no public record that the two men have directly communicated since they last met more than seven years ago, when Trump crossed into the North Korean Demilitarised Zone in June 2019. The high-optics summitry later collapsed without a breakthrough to roll back Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

And so Trump’s off-the-cuff assertion,“Yeah, I will be”, when asked by reporters on Wednesday (US time) if he expected to meet Kim this year, will be met with some scepticism.

He added that North Korea had “57 very powerful nuclear weapons ... If I were president, I wouldn’t have allowed it, but he’s got them”.

Trump praises North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, slashes military drills with Seoul

Experts have noted it is an oddly specific figure. While it broadly aligns with estimates dating back to 2017, some analysts believe Kim’s stockpiles to be much higher, pointing to his turbocharged nuclear program in the years since the talks with Trump.

This week, Trump matched his bravado with a tangible overture to Kim, scaling back joint military drills with South Korea while sideswiping Seoul as........

© WA Today