Trump wants another Kim Jong Un summit before the year is out

By Margaret Hale · 2026-08-19

A familiar gambit, a harder board

Diplomacy conducted by personal instinct tends to move in bursts. It bypasses the careful scaffolding of preconditions and working groups, and bets everything on a relationship that may exist more vividly in one leader's imagination than in any shared reality. That, in essence, is the posture Trump has resumed toward North Korea. According to U.S. officials cited in a Wall Street Journal report published on 18 August 2026, Trump has pressed aides to arrange an in-person meeting with Kim Jong Un before the end of this year.^[1]

November is the timing under internal discussion, with Trump expected to travel to Asia for the APEC summit in Shenzhen. Trump privately discussed holding talks with Kim at or around that gathering, according to the Journal's account.^[2] Whether Shenzhen becomes a staging point for a bilateral encounter depends on variables that remain entirely unresolved, most pressingly whether Kim Jong Un is willing to come at all.

Silence from the White House, coolness from Pyongyang

The Journal sought comment from White House officials, and received none.^[3] That silence is itself legible: it neither confirms the story nor provides the formal denial that might discourage Pyongyang from considering the approach. It is the sound of a door being held open by someone who does not wish to be seen doing so.

North Korea's own signalling has been less equivocal. A January 2026 briefing by the specialist think tank 38 North said North Korea quietly rejected U.S. overtures in late 2025 by proceeding with its first missile launches in six months.^[5] The launches were not accompanied by inflammatory rhetoric; they were simply conducted, which in Pyongyang's diplomatic grammar is a way of declining without saying no in language that requires a response.

The alliance question Seoul cannot ignore

Trump's mid-August decision to cut the scope of the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield joint military exercises with South Korea has amplified anxiety in Seoul. The said reasons included the cost of the exercises, South Korea's position on the U.S. campaign against Iran, and Trump's own sense of personal rapport with Kim. For South Korean planners, each of those rationales raises distinct and uncomfortable questions about an alliance that has underpinned Northeast Asian security for seven decades.

The formal U.S., South Korean position, restated as recently as April 2024, held that both governments remained open to engagement with Pyongyang. The joint statement from the two countries' foreign and defence ministers said: "Both sides reaffirmed that they remain open to dialogue with the DPRK without preconditions."^[4] State Department Principal Deputy Spokesperson Vedant Patel put the same point more directly: "We remain open to dialogue with the DPRK without preconditions," he said.^[6] That formulation was designed to leave the door ajar while placing the onus of a first step on Pyongyang, and it did not anticipate an American president who might push through the door himself, exercises scaled back and alliance partners' concerns said but not resolved.

Kim's leverage has grown since Hanoi

The 2019 Hanoi summit collapsed when negotiators could not bridge the gap between what North Korea wanted, substantial sanctions relief, and what Washington would offer in return for partial, reversible denuclearisation steps. No follow-on talks of substance occurred in the years that followed, and the peninsula's strategic environment has since shifted in ways that do not improve Washington's hand.

Since early 2026, North Korea has deepened its security partnership with Russia, deploying troops to support Moscow's campaign in Ukraine and supplying munitions at scale. That relationship gives Kim Jong Un an economic and strategic lifeline that does not depend on sanctions relief from the United States or normalisation with the broader international community. Kim also has something he lacked going into Hanoi: a credible outside option. A leader who needs a deal is a weaker negotiator than one who can afford to wait, and Kim's posture in 2026 more closely resembles the latter.

The geopolitical setting for any potential Shenzhen encounter adds a further layer of complexity. APEC will be hosted by China, whose government has its own considered views on the pace and terms of Korean Peninsula diplomacy. Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un met in Pyongyang as recently as June 2026. Beijing has not historically welcomed direct U.S., North Korean engagement that proceeds without Chinese involvement, and any summit logistics arranged around an event on Chinese soil would place Beijing in an unavoidably central position, whether or not that is Washington's intention.

The logic and the limits of personal diplomacy

Trump's approach to Kim has always rested on the proposition that the two men share a rapport that career diplomats cannot replicate, and that this rapport, properly leveraged, can unlock concessions that institutional negotiation cannot. The 2018 Singapore summit, whatever its substantive shortcomings, produced a sustained pause in North Korean provocations and established a channel that had not previously existed. The Hanoi failure, on that reading, was a failure of preparation rather than concept.

The counterargument is that Kim has now observed three years of no meaningful consequences from refusing engagement, while simultaneously acquiring a new great-power patron in Moscow and continuing to develop his country's weapons programme. The incentive structure facing Pyongyang today is materially different from the one that brought Kim to Singapore in June 2018. Whether Trump's conviction that "he misses me", a sentiment the president has said publicly, reflects a genuine reading of Kim's strategic calculus or a projection of the relationship Trump wishes the two men to have is a question that a Shenzhen encounter, if it occurs, would answer with some finality.

For now, the push is real and the destination is possible. Trump has pressed aides for a meeting before year-end, with the November APEC summit in Shenzhen the working timeline, and North Korea has not yet formally closed the door.

Margaret Hale

Margaret Hale writes about politics, policy and the culture of business. She is drawn to the people behind decisions and to the moments when a political story turns out to be a human one.