Trump to press South Korea's Moon before summit with North

President Donald Trump met South Korean President Moon Jae-in yesterday as US officials try to assess North Korea's intentions after Pyongyang threatened to pull out of a planned June 12 summit to discuss denuclearisation.

Moon's White House visit was intended to be a fine-tuning of the US and South Korean strategy for dealing with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

South Korea led efforts to resume dialogue with North Korea and Moon gave enthusiastic accounts of its encounters with Kim, spurring Trump to accept an offer of a first-ever meeting between US and North Korean presidents.

But the White House was caught off-guard when, in a dramatic change of tone, North Korea last week condemned the latest US-South Korean air combat drills, suspended North-South talks and threw into doubt the summit with Trump if Pyongyang was pushed toward 'unilateral nuclear abandonment'.

Moon arrived at the White House at noon EDT (7pm Kenyan time) for a meeting and a working lunch and left less than two hours later. Trump has insisted he remains committed to the summit.

His aides are looking to Moon to help determine whether Kim is taking a harder line against denuclearisation than South Korea had previously communicated to them, a US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Other US officials have privately expressed concern that Moon, eager to make progress with the North, may have overstated Kim’s willingness to negotiate in good faith over the dismantling of his nuclear arsenal.

Some in the US government worry that Moon may be prepared to accept a less-stringent version of North Korean denuclearisation than Washington wants.