Second Trump-Kim summit confirmed

In his State of the Union address Tuesday, President Donald Trump confirmed he will meet in person with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a summit on Feb. 27-28 in Vietnam. Trump said much work remains to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, but he hailed the progress made so far. “Our hostages have come home, nuclear testing has stopped, and there has not been a missile launch in more than 15 months,” he said. “If I had not been elected president of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea.”

Trump and Kim held their first summit in June 2018 in Singapore and promised to work toward disarming North Korea. But the communist country’s missile programs remain intact, and it has relocated its nuclear weapons to secure them from a potential U.S. strike, according to a report to the UN Security Council that was leaked this week. Last week, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told Congress that North Korea is unlikely to give up its nuclear weapons or the capacity to build more because the country views them as “critical to regime survival.” The North also reportedly continues to defy UN sanctions. The report cited a massive increase in illegal ship-to-ship transfers of petroleum products and coal at sea.