RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. President Donald Trump has made no secret of his desire to meet with North Korea's overlord, Kim Jong Un. In fact, Trump claims, it could happen within the next few months.
But the North Korean dictator doesn't seem to agree. Rather than acquiesce to Trump's leader-to-leader overtures, Pyongyang appears adamant it won't engage with either the U.S. or South Korea , which has for many months tried to open up communication with its bellicose northern neighbor.
Even Trump's personal diplomacy doesn't seem to be making Kim any more willing to entertain a meeting.
Trump told reporters on Wednesday he had spoken with Kim, a claim swiftly brushed aside by Kim Yo Jong, the supreme leader's sister and a top North Korean official.
She said her brother had a "great relationship" with the U.S. president, but didn't confirm any contact between the two leaders, according to North Korean media readouts.
The "U.S.’ hostile policy remains unchanged," she said.
North Korea's messaging is unmoved by Trump's abrupt scaling back of planned military drills with South Korea on Sunday, just hours before the exercises kicked off. North Korea had railed against these drills, calling the exercises a rehearsal for war.
The annual joint exercises "send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile" to North Korea , Trump said, a remark widely seen as an olive branch to Pyongyang—although Trump also framed the pullback as punishment for what he cast as Seoul's refusal to become embroiled in the U.S.' war with Iran.
The drills, dubbed Ulchi Freedom Shield, are now due to finish on Friday, just under a week earlier than scheduled.
"If the U.S. side attempts to promote the measures they have taken this time as some kind of 'goodwill gesture,' they will not get the answer they desire," said Kim Yo Jong.
The South Korean government has tried to reduce tensions with North Korea since current leader Lee Jae-myung was sworn in last June, including stopping propaganda broadcasts blaring from loudspeakers across the border.
Lee quickly vowed to end the "vicious cycle of unnecessary military tensions," but Pyongyang officially dropped the decades-old goal of reunification with Seoul in May, more than a year and a half after designating South Korea its "principal enemy."
The nations on the Korean peninsula are still technically at war and have been since an armistice marked the end of the Korean War in 1953.
Direct talks between the U.S. and North Korea are the most "practical" way to slam the brakes on North Korea's nuclear weapons program, a top South Korean official said on Friday, according to the country's Yonhap news agency.
"Inter-Korean exchange is at a standstill," the official told reporters.
"I think he misses me," Trump said of Kim in July 2024. He has also dubbed the North Korean dictator a "smart guy" and "not a religious zealot."
But Trump's second administration, as it settled into office early last year, quickly angered North Korea.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio called North Korea a "rogue state," and Pyongyang hit back at the remarks, condemning them as "coarse and nonsensical" that "thoughtlessly tarnish the image of a sovereign state."
Pyongyang also criticized the Trump administration's plans to construct its Golden Dome "next-generation missile defense shield," designed to protect the U.S. from all types of missile strikes, including North Korean weapons assaults.
Experts say Kim still remembers how Trump strode out of a summit in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, in 2019 without an agreement on U.S. sanctions and Pyongyang's nuclear weapons arsenal.
"Sometimes you have to walk," Trump said at the time.
North Korea says it wants to be recognized as a nuclear weapons state, and will never agree to denuclearize. Its nuclear weapons program has expanded in the years since Trump's first term in office, helped by assistance from Russia, experts say.
South Korea's Minister of National Defense Ahn Gyu-back said on Thursday Seoul assesses North Korea to have up to 120 nuclear warheads. This number comes in far higher than the figure of 57 Trump gave the previous day.
Nuclear experts at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said at the start of 2026 that Pyongyang had an estimated 60 nuclear warheads.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Dan Orton and Tony Phillips .
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