President Trump declared on Wednesday that North Korea no longer poses a nuclear threat to the world, offering an optimistic assessment of his summit talks with Kim Jong Un.
Trump made the declaration in a pair of tweets as he arrived back in Washington from Singapore, where he met with Kim for the first-ever talks between a sitting U.S. president and North Korean premier.
“Just landed – a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” Trump tweeted. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future!”
“Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea,” he wrote in a second tweet. “President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer – sleep well tonight!”
{mosads}The summit on Tuesday culminated in the signing of a brief document committing the U.S. to unspecified security guarantees for North Korea in exchange for the eventual denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
While the exact terms of that agreement remain murky, Trump announced that the U.S. would suspend joint military exercises with South Korea that Pyongyang has long claimed are essentially rehearsals for an eventual invasion of the North.
But questions have been raised about how comprehensive the agreement is — and how much ground the U.S. may be ceded to the North.
The document signed on Tuesday gives virtually no details beyond a stated commitment to denuclearize. North Korea has made such a promise many times before, but has repeatedly failed to carry it out.