Secretary of State Mike Pompeo welcomes North Korean Vice-Chairman Kim Yong Chol prior to a meeting in Washington, D.C. | Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images white house Trump to meet with Kim Jong Un for second time next month The announcement came after Trump met with a top North Korean official in the Oval Office on Friday for over an hour.

President Donald Trump will hold a second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in late February, the White House said Friday, the latest effort to jump-start stalled nuclear negotiations with the Asian country.

The announcement, which did not give a location for the summit, comes as Trump faces domestic political blow-back over the ongoing government shutdown. A second summit could offer him a foreign policy goal to point to as a way of rallying supporters.


But while tensions between Pyongyang and Washington have eased in recent months, there's no guarantee that another get-together between Kim and Trump will lead North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program as the U.S. wants. The two leaders' first confab in Singapore last June — the first time two sitting leaders from the U.S. and North Korea had met — has not led to Pyongyang reducing its nuclear missile program. In fact, analysts say the country has only continued to secretly expand some missile bases.

The brief announcement of a second summit came shortly after Trump met with Kim Yong-chol, a top North Korean official, in the Oval Office.

“President Donald J. Trump met with Kim Yong Chol for an hour and half, to discuss denuclearization and a second summit, which will take place near the end of February," the White House said in a statement. "The President looks forward to meeting with Chairman Kim at a place to be announced at a later date.”

The White House did not confirm reports that the Kim Yong-chol had brought a letter from Kim Jong Un for Trump. The two heads of state have exchanged letters in the past.

Vietnam and Thailand have both been floated as location options.

Analysts said the mere fact that the North Koreans are still talking to the Americans is good news, underscoring the deescalation of tensions. Its a marked contrast from August 2017, when Trump warned Pyongyang that it faced "fire and fury" if it did not stop threatening the United States.

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But if and when a second summit is held, the two leaders will be under pressure to walk away with something more concrete than the vague declaration aiming for denuclearization that Trump and Kim agreed to last June, North Korea specialists said.

"Both nations must now show at least some tangible benefits from their diplomatic efforts during a second summit, or risk their efforts being panned as nothing more than reality TV," Harry Kazianis, of the foreign policy think tank Center for the National Interest, said in an email.

The U.S. could offer North Korea partial sanctions relief from in Pyongyang permanently closes a nuclear facility, Kazianis suggested.

So far, the Trump White House has held firm to the stance that North Korea must fully denuclearize before it will lift sanctions.

Trump has cast his approach to North Korea as one of his foreign policy successes. He has regularly boasted of having a warm relationship with Kim Jong Un, even saying that he and the North Korean dictator "fell in love" when they first met. And he's noted that Pyongyang has stopped its missile tests since talks started.

But the president has at times overstated the progress he's made. After the June summit, for instance, he declared on Twitter that "there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea," a statement most experts have dismissed.

In the months since, North Korea has done little to live up to the vague promise of denuclearization. Just this Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pompeo admitted: “We still await concrete steps by North Korea to dismantle the nuclear weapons that threaten our people and our allies in the region.”

Given North Korea's history of clinging to its nuclear weapons program, many officials and analysts are deeply skeptical that the country, which views South Korea, the United States and Japan as major adversaries, will ever give up an atomic arsenal that it sees as key to its survival.

But North Korean officials also know that having an audience with the U.S. president can help boost their international prestige while emboldening countries such as Russia and China to skirt U.S. sanctions and work with Pyongyang. So getting Trump to agree to a second summit may simply be part of a long-term strategy to weaken sanctions.

North Koreans are also keenly aware of the domestic pressures Trump faces, including his low approval ratings, the impact of the government shutdown and the ongoing special counsel probe of his campaign's ties to Russia, analysts said. If Trump is seeking a distraction, they're happy to hand him one.

"The North Koreans follow our politics very closely and we should expect them to take full advantage of Trump’s weakened position as they map out their negotiating strategies," Suzanne DiMaggio, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in an email.

That Kim Yong-chol was able to meet with Trump himself could also speak to a flaw in the U.S. president's negotiating strategy.

"Following the Singapore summit, Trump fostered an unproductive dynamic that led the North Koreans to conclude they should only deal with Trump," DiMaggio wrote. "As a result, U.S. negotiators hit a brick wall when they attempted to engage their counterparts at the working level."

Kim Yong-chol, who is one of Kim Jong Un's top aides, met earlier Friday with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other U.S. diplomats involved in the nuclear discussions. But that meeting was noticeably shorter than the one with Trump.

Steve Biegun, a U.S. special representative for the North Korean talks, was among those at the Friday morning meeting. He is expected to head to Sweden soon for more talks with North Korean officials that could also help plan for a summit.

Biegun has struggled to make contact with his North Korean counterparts during the past several months, and its not yet clear how much weight his words will carry.