The US President Donald Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in in 2017. (Getty Images/Alex Wong)

President Trump Considers to Visit Korea’s Demilitarized Zone After Summit

The US President Donald Trump is reported to be considering a visit to North and South Korea’s demilitarized zone (DMZ) during his scheduled trip to the South’s capital Seoul on Saturday and Sunday, after the G-20 summit.

According to South Korean presidential spokesman Ko Min-jung, Trump is scheduled to meet Moon on Sunday and expected to have in-depth discussions with him on ways to establish long-lasting peace in the Korean peninsula through the complete denuclearization program, while further strengthening the alliance between South Korea and the US.

Despite the visit, there will no plans for the president to hold a trilateral meeting Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un during his visit.

However, when asked about the DMZ visit, a White House official didn’t give any comment as there are some things that are still coming together. Trump’s first attempt to visit the demilitarized zone was in 2017 but forced to turn back due to bad weather. The cancelation of the trip has made the president become ‘disappointed’, as told by the White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee at that time. But even so, other officials of Trump’s administration have visited the zone, including Vice President Mike Pence, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis.

The DMZ is a 4km deep and 255km long buffer zone between South and North Korea, which has kept the two countries apart since the Korean War. It a small portion of the Joint Security Area that once called as ‘the scariest place on earth’ by former US President Bill Clinton, where North and South Koreans used to stand face to face with guns at the ready.

The two Korean leaders met there twice last year and sought to end the conflict with an armistice—though not a peace treaty—and vowed to turn the entire DMZ into a ‘peace zone’.

Source: https://edition-m.cnn.com/2019/06/24/politics/trump-considers-visit-to-korean-dmz/index.html