Trump Says He Might Meet Kim Jong-un on His Asia Trip. Washington Has Already Met Kim’s Main Condition — and Heard Nothing Back.

Asked at the White House on October 12 whether he plans to meet Kim Jong-un during his trip to Asia next month, Trump said he might. He gave no details.

The trip is for the APEC leaders’ summit in Shenzhen, China, on November 18–19. That is two weeks after the November 3 midterms.

The Latest of Many Signals

Trump has said several times he wants to meet Kim this year. The offers have been building since summer.

• August: Trump told aides to arrange a Kim meeting around APEC. He also ordered US-South Korea drills drastically reduced, citing his “very good relationship” with Kim.
• September 1: The White House said Trump is open to talks “without any preconditions” and left out the word denuclearization.
• September 29: Trump called Kim “my friend” and said North Korea has “a pretty substantial nuclear capability.”
• October 12: A possible meeting on the Asia trip.

Pyongyang has not publicly taken up any of them.

Kim’s Condition, Already Met

Kim’s position is that he will no longer discuss denuclearization. In September 2025 he told North Korea’s parliament that he had good memories of Trump and could talk with the US — if Washington dropped its demand that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons.

Washington’s answer has split in two. The State Department still lists denuclearization as the goal. Trump and the White House have stopped saying it, and offer talks with no preconditions instead. In practice, the president’s side has already met the condition Kim set a year ago.

Where They Might Meet

If Kim agrees, the venue is open — China, or a third country. Some observers think Trump could try to become the first sitting US president to visit Pyongyang, a made-for-television moment. His former national security adviser John Bolton has predicted exactly that.

A meeting in or around Shenzhen would give Beijing a hand in the diplomacy. China is North Korea’s main economic lifeline, and Trump and Xi Jinping have two more meetings planned for November and December after Xi’s state visit in September.

There is a recent precedent for disappointment. Trump also sought a Kim meeting at last year’s APEC summit in Gyeongju, South Korea. It did not happen.

Look at the ledger before any meeting takes place. The US has reduced joint drills, dropped “denuclearization” from the president’s vocabulary, described North Korea’s arsenal as substantial and settled, and called its leader a friend. North Korea has given nothing in public. That changes what a summit can produce. In 2018 and 2019 the agenda, at least on paper, was disarmament. A 2026 meeting would start from recognition, so the realistic outcome is a freeze or an arms-control framing — talks between the US and a nuclear state. The countries most exposed to that shift are South Korea and Japan, which live inside North Korea’s missile range and rely on the US commitment that the word denuclearization used to express.

The Other Side

Talking is cheaper than the alternative. Direct contact lowers the risk of miscalculation on the most militarized border in the world. Trump’s first-term summits — Singapore and Hanoi, plus a brief meeting at the DMZ in 2019 — produced no disarmament, but North Korea has not conducted a nuclear test since 2017, and it paused long-range missile tests until 2022. A freeze that caps an arsenal still growing would be better than no limit at all. And thirty years of insisting on full denuclearization did not stop North Korea from building the bomb.