US President Donald Trump said that the U.S.-North Korea summit has reduced the risk of "potential Nuclear catastrophe" and thanked North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for meeting with him.
"The World has taken a big step back from potential Nuclear catastrophe! No more rocket launches, nuclear testing or research! The hostages are back home with their families. Thank you to Chairman Kim, our day together was historic!" Trump tweeted on Tuesday night.
"I want to thank Chairman Kim for taking the first bold step toward a bright new future for his people. Our unprecedented meeting – the first between an American President and a leader of North Korea – proves that real change is possible!" he added.
President Trump complimented Kim Jong Un after their Singapore summit as a "strong guy" and a "great negotiator," and argued his once-fiery rhetoric directed toward Kim worked.
"He’s got a very good personality, he’s funny, and he’s very, very smart. He’s a great negotiator, and he’s a very strategic kind of a guy," Fox News cited Trump as saying.
The president said he and Kim "got along very well" from "the beginning" of the summit.
The joint declaration stated that the U.S. has committed to providing “security guarantees” to Pyongyang. Whether the unpredictable North Korean leader will follow through remains unclear, but Trump sounded optimistic as he left the summit.
"His country has to be denuked, and he understood that, he fully understood it. He didn’t fight it," the US president said.
Trump also said he believed the North Korean leader would start to work toward dismantling his country’s nuclear program "virtually immediately." "We want to denuke the entire peninsula," Trump said.
But according to Politico newspaper, confusion is reigning among Republicans over how far Trump went in agreeing to pull back military exercises on the Korean peninsula in his talks with Kim Jong Un.
US Vice President Mike Pence told Senate Republicans that some training exchanges and readiness training with South Korea will continue, according to Sen. Cory Gardner. Gardner told reporters that Pence and the administration will continue "to clarify what the president had talked about" but said that "exercises will continue with South Korea."
The Japanese government believes that the problem of North Korea’s full denuclearization cannot be solved during just one meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters at a news conference.
"President Trump said the [denuclearization] process is beginning. The North Korean issue cannot be resolved during just one top-level meeting," he said, adding that the joint Trump-Kim summit statement did not include a paragraph on "a complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization."
At the same time, Suga once again reaffirmed that Japan is ready to defray the cost of the nuclear disarmament process in North Korea but would do so only after the resumption of inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
On June 12, the US President and North Korean leader signed a document at the first ever bilateral summit in Singapore pledging to establish a new relationship. It states that enhanced mutual trust could help denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.
The President of the National Strategy Institute, Mikhail Remizov, speaking with the correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that the meeting has given hope for a settlement of the Korean crisis and, in the long term, the emergence of a new major player in the East Asia region. "First of all, after the Trump-Kim talks, the risk of a direct escalation of the conflict between the United States and the DPRK has decreased. Respectively, the countries of the region can be satisfied with the meeting, at least in terms of reducing security risks. In addition, a certain ghost of Korean integration appears, not without reason the meeting with Trump was preceded by talks between the leaders of North and South Korea," he explained.
"At the same time, there remains the question of how feasible the provisions on denuclearization are, and it is still rather difficult to give an answer, especially given the fact that there are no real security guarantees from the Kim regime. In addition, Pyongyang can not go to full denuclearization, because the possession of nuclear weapons is one of the cornerstones of maintaining the regime's stability. Probably the recent negotiations simply fixed the completion of the stage when nuclear missile technology was tested by the North Korea. A certain status quo may be achieved in the future," Mikhail Remizov expects.
The President of the National Strategy Institute stressed that Russia would welcome the prospect of integration of the two Koreas, unless it means an expansion of the US military presence on the peninsula near Russia's borders.
Political scientist Rovshan Ibrahimov estimated the consequences of the meeting between the leaders of the US and the DPRK as very significant for the region of East Asia. "I think it will be the starting point for the subsequent rapprochement of positions, as well as smoothing out the sharp angles and resolving the differences that have been accumulating for decades," he said.
"In the medium term, we can observe the gradual lifting of US sanctions from North Korea and the more active cooperation not only between the US and North Korea, but also between the two Koreas, as well as Japan. All this will be the preamble for a guaranteed and sustainable peace in a region in which everyone is interested, including Russia. Russia has repeatedly proposed to be the direct guarantor of the construction of communications, including highways, railways, pipelines for exporting natural gas to the North and South Korea. South Korea is a very active consumer of natural gas, but it only gets in the form of LNG, because it has no pipeline infrastructure - and Russia could fill this gap," Rovshan Ibrahimov suggested.
