Donald Trump offered to give North Korean leader Kim Jong-un a lift and take him home on Air Force One’s presidential plane after completing the summit in Hanoi, Vietnam two years ago, one said. senior administrative officer in a statement to the BBC in a documentary.
Kim and Trump sustained a dialectical war and mutual threats before starring in an extraordinary diplomatic romance that resulted in two meetings and a declaration of love from the former US president, despite no significant progress in the goal of denuclearizing Korea .
The Hanoi summit ended abruptly, without even reaching a joint statement, as diplomatic practice indicates, due to irreconcilable stances on denuclearization and the relaxation of sanctions against Pyongyang. It was then that the US president said, “Sometimes you have to leave.”
According to the three-part documentary produced by the BBC “Trump Takes on the World”, “the then US president surprised even the most experienced diplomats” with the offer. Kim to take him back to North Korea aboard Air Force One after the 2019 summit in Vietnam.
“President Trump offered Kim a ride on Air Force One,” Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s National Security Council’s top Asia expert, told the BBC.
The president knew that Kim had made a long journey of several days through China to Hanoi and the president said, ‘I can take you home in two hours if you want,’ Kim refused.
Had Kim accepted the offer, the North Korean leader, and likely some of those around him, would not only have entered the US presidential plane, but it would have invaded North Korean airspace, causing security concerns.
For his first summit with Trump in Singapore in 2018, Kim traveled on an Air China plane. The Chinese authorities are interested in keeping North Korea under its sphere of influence – whose existence as a buffer state keeps US forces in South Korea away from the Chinese border.
The BBC series also includes an interview with former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton, who attended the summit.
Bolton said that as they went to the meeting, Trump was confident that he could strike a deal once he was in the room with Kim.
“Trump clearly thought he had a new best friend in Kim Jong Un,” Bolton, now one of the former president’s strongest critics, said. Sunday times“Trump thought relations between the United States and North Korea were great because he and Kim were friends. It’s a very dangerous perception.”
He had already shown him “The Beast”
At the previous summit in Singapore, Trump showed Kim the inside of his presidential car, a $ 1.5 million Cadillac known as “The Beast,” as a sign of their friendly relationship.
Last month, Kim said the United States remains his country’s “worst enemy” and assured that Washington’s policy against North Korea “will never change” regardless of “who is in power.”
The official North Korean press has not yet referred to President Joe Biden.
