Day after summit, Trump claims North Korea 'no longer a nuclear threat'

Kim Hjelmgaard | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Will North Korea really give up nuclear weapons? Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un's meeting face-to-face was historic and unprecedented. Here's a look at what we can expect in the coming months.

President Donald Trump claimed that "there is no longer a nuclear threat" from North Korea after arriving back in Washington from Singapore where he met with Kim Jong Un for a historic summit.

Trump landed at Andrews Air Force Base early Wednesday and fired off a series of tweets about the meeting.

"Everybody can now feel much safer," he said. "Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer."

Trump's optimism for what the summit achieved comes amid skepticism from his critics on whether he gave away too much in return for too little by agreeing to share a stage with Kim, a known human rights abuser whose regime has failed repeatedly to live up to diplomatic promises.

Trump and Kim signed a joint statement in which North Korea pledged to denuclearize, but there are few specifics on how and when that would happen. Much of the text repeated vows to work toward a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.

U.S. allies Japan and South Korea were concerned that Trump agreed to halt American military exercises with South Korea, which North Korea has long claimed were invasion preparations. Japan and South Korea have large U.S. military presences in their countries.

Trump: 'Got Along Very Well' With Kim Jong Un Shortly after the end of U.S. President Donald Trump's historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump sat for an interview with Fox News Reporter Sean Hannity where he said he and Chairman Kim "got along very well." (June 12)

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"The U.S.-South Korea joint exercises and U.S. forces in South Korea play significant roles for the security in East Asia," Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said Wednesday.

Previous American presidents refused face-to-face meetings with North Korea's leadership over fears of legitimizing a totalitarian state that admitted to state-sponsored kidnapping and sent thousands of its citizens to forced labor camps.

"I did it because nuclear (security) is always No. 1 to me," Trump said during a news conference in Singapore Tuesday.

North Korea has taken no verified, concrete steps toward denuclearization.

Wednesday in Pyongyang, newspapers ran photos of Trump and Kim standing side-by-side on the world stage and touted an "epoch-making meeting much awaited by the whole world."

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