Senators Cautious Ahead Of Trump-Kim Summit: ‘High Hopes, But No Particular Expectations’
During his State of the Union address earlier this week, President Donald Trump announced that he would be meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un for the second time.
The meeting will be held on February 27 and 28 in the Vietnamese capital city of Hanoi. The second meeting between the two leaders is meant to “advance the cause of peace,” according to BBC.
In a Twitter message posted on February 9, President Trump praised Kim Jong-un, claiming that North Korea will become an economic “rocket” under his leadership. United States Senators remain cautious and skeptical, albeit hopeful, the Hill reports.
“High hopes, but no particular expectations,” said Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah.
“The North Koreans have proved over the years that their promises can’t be relied upon.”
But some are more optimistic. Oklahoma Republican and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe explained why he expects results from the Vietnam summit to be more concrete than those from the Singapore summit. According to Inhofe, President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un would not be meeting if the two weren’t committed to striking some sort of deal.
“If we didn’t expect really some good results from it…then we wouldn’t be doing it,” Inhofe said. “I don’t think they’d be coming back together, and I don’t think Kim Jong Un would come back together, if he didn’t feel in his own mind he was going to be more cooperative.”
But Democrats remain highly critical of Donald Trump’s effort to denuclearize North Korea. Armed Services ranking member Jack Reed expressed skepticism.
“It’s going to be hard for them to come up with something really tangible,” Reed said.
Reed’s party colleague and the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Menendez, said that his hopes are not high.
Trump touts Kim summit: North Korea will become economic "rocket" https://t.co/TxUEIB5rIH pic.twitter.com/kLjkscBwEw
— The Hill (@thehill) February 9, 2019
For Menendez, the alleged lack of agreement on what constitutes denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is a problem in and of itself. A proper definition has to be established before Trump meets with Kim, he said.
As previously reported by the Inquisitr, the relationship between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un appears to have evolved. The two leaders went from threatening and insulting each other to holding promising talks, in hopes of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.
Some have criticized President Donald Trump’s alleged tendency to “cozy up” to dictators, however, pointing out that the president appears infatuated with individuals such as China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
