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Donald Trump says Xi Jinping wrote him a ‘beautiful note’ after rally shooting
Donald Trump has said China’s president wrote him a “beautiful note” after the assassination attempt a week ago, as he continued to court leaders whom Joe Biden has criticised as dictators.In his first campaign rally since narrowly escaping the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania, Trump told a crowd in Michigan on Saturday: “[President Xi Jinping] wrote me a beautiful note the other day when he heard about what happened.”The Republican presidential nominee recalled how he described Xi as “a brilliant man, he controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist”, adding that the Chinese leader makes people like Biden look like “babies”.As well as familiar attacks on Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, Trump also used the rally in Grand Rapids to hail Xi and Vladimir Putin as “smart, tough” figures who “love their country”, echoing praise he gave in 2022 of the Russian president’s strategy to invade Ukraine. In that same 2022 speech, at a rally in Georgia, Trump called North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un “tough”, and said of Kim and Xi: “The smartest one gets to the top.” On Saturday, Trump said he “got along very well” with both leaders.Still wearing a small wound dressing a week after the shooting, Trump also publicly supported the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, saying he was right in saying that “we have to have somebody that can protect us”. Orbán was this week accused by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, of betraying European leaders after he travelled to Moscow for what he called a “peace mission”, holding a joint press conference with Putin in which the Russian leader told Kyiv to give up more land, pull back its troops and drop its efforts to join Nato.After meeting Trump recently in Florida, Orbán flagged the likelihood of a Trump victory, and urged European leaders to reopen “direct lines of diplomatic communication” with Russia and “high-level political talks” with China.Trump’s reference to a “beautiful note” from Xi echoes the now-famous “love letters” he received from North Korea’s Kim. In September 2018, Trump told a rally in West Virginia: “We fell in love. No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters.”The Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward later obtained 25 letters between Trump and Kim for his second book on the Trump presidency, Rage.In one letter, about a meeting in Singapore in June 2018, Kim wrote: “Even now I cannot forget that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency’s hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched.”After a summit in Vietnam in February 2019, Kim wrote that “every minute we shared 103 days ago in Hanoi was also a moment of glory that remains a precious memory”.The summits did not reduce tensions with North Korea.With Reuters More
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The Guardian view on Putin and Kim: an alarming new pact needs close attention | Editorial
A shiny, sanctions-busting Russian limousine for Kim Jong-un. A fawning, rapturous reception for Vladimir Putin. These grand gestures may be welcomed by the North Korean and Russian leaders, but are intended as much for their global audience as for each other. The real prize is the strategic partnership treaty that they signed during Mr Putin’s first visit to Pyongyang since 2000. The question is what it will mean in practical terms.The relationship has been reinvigorated by events outside Asia, but hopes of containing it lie within the region. The proximate cause is evidently Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: an isolated and impoverished Pyongyang is already believed to have supplied millions of artillery shells in return for cheap oil, food and other sorely needed goods. Russia might also benefit from North Korean manpower, though much more likely for labour than combat.Further back lies Donald Trump’s disastrous wooing and dismissal of Mr Kim. Entirely predictably, by handing him a top-level summit without any realistic strategy to improve relations in the long term, the then president ensured Mr Kim gave up on improving relations with the US and looked elsewhere. He also prompted Mr Putin and Xi Jinping, who had kept Mr Kim at a distance, to hug him closer.The revival of a Soviet-era pledge of mutual support against “aggression” sounds primarily symbolic given North Korea’s nuclear prowess. More disturbing is Mr Putin’s remark that the partnership could include “military technical cooperation”. US intelligence officials have said that they believe Russia is providing nuclear submarine and ballistic missile technology, though it is likely to extract a high price for such expertise and to have mixed feelings about North Korea’s advances. At a minimum, Russia – which signed up to sanctions in the Obama years – is now obstructing diplomatic action to restrain North Korea.The west has long feared a stronger relationship between Pyongyang, Moscow and Beijing. The launch of the Australian, UK and US (Aukus) security pact, a reaction to China’s growing forcefulness in the Asia-Pacific region, has in turn raised Beijing’s hackles. But China does not regard the others as peers and does not want to be seen as part of a trilateral axis with two pariah states, hence the lack of a Beijing stop on Mr Putin’s Asian tour itinerary. It would also like to retain primacy in managing North Korea, and to limit its weapons development. It does not want the US to become more active in the region and is concerned that it is growing closer to Japan and South Korea, which are also increasing their defence capabilities. Mr Kim’s shift from the long-held commitment to unification with the South to stressing hostility has not helped.South Korea also said explicitly that it will consider sending arms to Ukraine in reaction to the Russian-North Korean deal, spelling out the message to Moscow. Until now, Seoul has limited direct support to non-lethal supplies, though it has signed hefty arms deals with allies of Kyiv. Russia, which has also ramped up its own arms manufacturing at speed, may in the longer term seek to rekindle relations with South Korea and Japan anyway; their large economies compare strikingly to the limited attractions of North Korea. That too offers hope that this deal could be constrained both in extent and duration. The danger is how much damage is caused in the meantime. More
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Putin’s Presidential Planes: What We Know
The Kremlin clings to Soviet-designed aircraft even as Russia’s commercial carriers opt for Western planes.When President Vladimir V. Putin travels abroad — as he did this week to North Korea and Vietnam to bolster alliances and nurture security ties amid Russia’s war in Ukraine — he typically flies in dated, Soviet-designed Ilyushin Il-96 series jets.With his latest trip coming shortly after aircraft crashes killed two other world leaders, President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran and Vice President Saulos Chilima of Malawi, a Kremlin spokesman felt it necessary recently to reassure the Russian public that Mr. Putin’s planes were “very reliable.”Though Russian airline carriers have abandoned Ilyushin models in favor of newer Western models — neither of the country’s two major airlines, Aeroflot and Rossiya, currently list any Ilyushin planes in their commercial passenger fleet — Mr. Putin seems steadfast in his commitment.Accompanied by fighter jets, Mr. Putin took an Il-96 on a whirlwind day trip in 2023 for talks with leaders in United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Earlier that same year, another plane in the government’s Il-96 fleet was tracked stopping at airports in Washington and New York to retrieve Russian diplomats who the Kremlin said had been ordered to leave the United States.In 2018, Mr. Putin traveled to Finland in an Il-96 — and was accused of briefly trespassing in NATO airspace — for a summit meeting with former U.S. President Donald J. Trump.Little is known about the Rossiya special flight squadron, also known as the 235th separate aviation detachment, that is responsible for the Kremlin’s aircrafts, including the Il-96s, Tu-214 airplanes and Mi-38 helicopters. Russian state media reports that 2,500 people work in the unit.Though using an outdated plane may baffle outsiders, Mr. Putin may be using the Soviet-designed aircraft to send a message of Russian resiliency and strength.“It’s the musings of a czar,” said Adam Taichi Kraft, a former intelligence collection strategist with the Defense Intelligence Agency who now consults on national security issues, “to be able to will himself into the sky using whatever equipment he wants.” More
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Putin Will Head to North Korea as Ukraine War Redefines Ties With Kim
President Vladimir V. Putin’s military needs have prompted the Kremlin to strengthen ties with the authoritarian government of Kim Jong-un, which is well stocked in munitions.President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will head to North Korea for the first time in 24 years on Tuesday after vowing to bring ties with Pyongyang to new heights and jointly combat what he called the “global neocolonial dictatorship” of the United States.The war against Ukraine has driven Mr. Putin closer to the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, who has won new status with the Kremlin by opening his vast munitions stores to Moscow.Nine months ago, after Mr. Kim arrived by armored train in the Russian Far East, the two men met at a Russian cosmodrome and toasted their “sacred struggle” against the West. The North Korean leader, in between visiting sensitive Russian rocket and fighter jet facilities, invited Mr. Putin to make a reciprocal visit.Now, the Russian president has taken him up on the offer. And the deepening relationship between the two authoritarian leaders poses a particular challenge for Washington. The United States once relied on Moscow’s cooperation in its attempts to curb North Korea’s nuclear and missile program. Now, it faces a Kremlin intent on playing spoiler to American geopolitical interests around the world.Russian state media released footage showing large Russian flags and portraits of a smiling Mr. Putin lining the streets of Pyongyang as North Korea prepared to welcome the Russian leader.What does Russia want?Ahead of the trip, Mr. Putin issued an order authorizing the conclusion of a new “comprehensive strategic partnership” agreement with North Korea.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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Experts dismiss Kristi Noem’s ‘dubious’ claim to have met Kim Jong-un
The South Dakota governor, Republican vice-presidential hopeful and self-confessed dog-killer Kristi Noem’s bizarre claim in a new book to have met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has been dismissed by experts as “dubious” and not “conceivable”.The Dakota Scout first reported Noem’s claim, which is in her forthcoming book, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward.The book will be published next week. Last week, the Guardian obtained a copy and reported how Noem describes killing Cricket – a 14-month-old dog she said she “hated” – after deeming her uncontrollable and a danger to people, and a goat she said was “nasty and mean”, smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid”, and bothered her children.Noem has repeatedly defended the story as illustrative of the harsh realities of farm life. But it set off a political firestorm, by most assessments dynamiting the governor’s chance of being named running mate to Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president.The Scout reported that Noem’s book also contains “at least two instances in which she recounts meetings with world leaders that are in dispute”.In one, Noem writes: “Through my tenure on the House armed services committee, I had the chance to travel to many countries to meet with world leaders.“I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all).”But the Scout quoted one “longtime, high-level Capitol Hill staffer” who worked on the armed services committee when Noem was on it, between 2013 and 2015, as saying: “It’s bullshit.”“That staffer was among a dozen staffers … who said they had no knowledge of the meeting, or who said Noem had never mentioned it before,” the paper said.It quoted experts saying Noem’s claim to have met with Kim, the autocratic leader of a pariah state who did not even meet with Barack Obama – the US president for the first five years of Noem’s time in the US House – was unlikely.“I don’t see any conceivable way that a single junior member of Congress without explicit escort from the US state department and military would be meeting with a leader from North Korea,” George Lopez of Notre Dame University, an expert on North Korea, told the Scout.“What would have been so critical in his bag of tricks that he would have met with an American lawmaker, this one distinctively?”Another North Korea expert, Benjamin Young of Virginia Commonwealth University, called Noem’s account of meeting Kim “dubious”.“There’s no way,” Young told the Scout. “There’s no way.”Noem also claims to have canceled a meeting with Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. She writes of being in Paris, “slated to meet” the French president.“However, the day before we were to meet he made what I considered a very pro-Hamas and anti-Israel comment to the press. So, I decided to cancel. There is no place for pro-Hamas rhetoric.”Macron’s office told the Scout no direct invitation to Noem was issued, though it did say Noem and Macron might have been scheduled to attend the same event last 10 November.Noem spoke at a conference in Paris that day, the same day Macron called for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war.Noem’s spokesperson did not comment to the Scout before it published its story.After the story went live, the paper said, it was told: “The publisher will be addressing conflated world leaders’ names in the book before it is released.”Trump did meet Kim: in Singapore in 2018, in Hanoi in 2019, and in the Demilitarised Zone between North and South Korea later the same year. No lasting diplomatic progress was made.
This article was amended on 3 May 2024 to correct the title of the newspaper cited. It is the Dakota Scout, not the South Dakota Scout as first reported. More - in Elections
Is North Korea Planning a War?
An intensification of nuclear threats from North Korea while the world is preoccupied with other wars has ignited an urgent debate over Mr. Kim’s motives.North Korea fired hundreds of artillery shells in waters near South Korean border islands on Jan. 5. Last week, it said it no longer regarded the South as inhabited by “fellow countrymen” but as a “hostile state” it would subjugate through a nuclear war. On Friday, it said it had tested an underwater nuclear drone to help repel U.S. Navy fleets.That new drumbeat of threats, while the United States and its allies have been preoccupied with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, has set foreign officials and analysts wondering whether the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has moved beyond posturing and is planning to assert more military force.For decades, a central part of the North Korean playbook has been to stage carefully measured and timed military provocations — some aimed at tightening internal discipline, others at demanding attention from its neighbors and the United States, or all of that at once.But to several close watchers of North Korea, the latest round of signals from Mr. Kim feels different. Some are taking it as a clue that the North has become disillusioned with seeking diplomatic engagement with the West, and a few are raising the possibility that the country could be planning a sudden assault on South Korea.A New Year’s celebration in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, on Dec. 31, 2023.Kim Won Jin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTwo veteran analysts of North Korea — the former State Department official Robert L. Carlin and the nuclear scientist Siegfried S. Hecker — sounded an alarm this past week in an article for the U.S.-based website 38 North, asserting that Mr. Kim was done with mere threats. “Kim Jong-un has made a strategic decision to go to war,” they wrote.Analysts broadly agree that North Korea has been shifting its posture in recent years, compelled by an accumulation of both internal problems, including a moribund economy and food and oil shortages, and frustrations in its external diplomacy, like Mr. Kim’s failure to win an end to international sanctions through direct diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump. And most agree that the North’s recent closeness with Russia, including supplying artillery shells and missiles for use in Russia’s war in Ukraine, will be a game-changer in some way.But there is still stark disagreement over where Mr. Kim’s new tack might be leading.Many say that Mr. Kim’s ultimate goal remains not a war with South Korea, a treaty ally of the United States, but Washington’s acceptance of his country as a nuclear power by prompting arms-reduction talks.“The North Koreans won’t start a war unless they decide to become suicidal; they know too well that they cannot win the war,” said Park Won-gon, a North Korea expert at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. “But they would love their enemies to believe that they could, because that could lead to engagement and possible concessions, like the easing of sanctions.”Posters in Pyongyang remind citizens of North Korea’s need to remain on a war footing.Cha Song Ho/Associated PressAnalysts in China, North Korea’s most vital ally, were also deeply skeptical that Mr. Kim would go to war unless the North were attacked. Prof. Shi Yinhong, at Renmin University in Beijing, asserted that the North’s leadership, not being irrational, ultimately acted out of self-preservation — and that starting a war would work against that goal.Others noted that the North could assert itself militarily, including through smaller conventional strikes and bolder weapons testing, without necessarily triggering a deadly response.“There are many rungs of the escalation ladder that North Korea can climb short of all-out war,” said Victor Cha, a Korea expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Kim is not that confident in his capabilities to deter U.S. reaction if he were to do something rash.”If Mr. Kim wants to climb that ladder, recent history suggests that this might be the time.North Korea has liked to unsettle its enemies at their most sensitive political moments, and both the United States and South Korea are holding elections this year. The North launched a long-range rocket in late 2012, between the United States and South Korean presidential elections. It conducted a nuclear test shortly before the inauguration of a South Korean leader in 2013. In 2016, it conducted another nuclear test two months before the American presidential election.North Korea could also attempt provocations in the coming weeks to try to help liberals who favor inter-Korean negotiations win parliamentary elections in South Korea in April, said the analyst Ko Jae-hong at the Seoul-based Institute for National Security Strategy. Through provocations, North Korea hopes to spread fears among South Korean voters that increasing pressure on the North, as the current administration of President Yoon Suk Yeol has tried to do, might “lead to a nuclear war,” he said.South Korean military exercises this month near the border with North Korea.Ahn Young-Joon/Associated PressNorth Korea “will continue to increase tensions until after the U.S. elections,” said Thomas Schäfer, a former German diplomat who served twice as ambassador to North Korea. But “at the height of tensions, it will finally be willing to re-engage with a Republican administration in the hope to get sanctions relief, some sort of acceptance of their nuclear program, and — as main objective — a reduction or even complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula,” Mr. Schäfer said in a rebuttal to Mr. Carlin’s and Mr. Hecker’s analysis.Since Mr. Kim came to power in 2011, he has committed to building North Korea’s nuclear capability, using it both as a deterrent and as a negotiating tool to try to win concessions from Washington, like the removal of U.N. sanctions, to achieve economic growth.He tried it when he met Mr. Trump in 2018 and again in 2019. It failed spectacularly, and Mr. Kim returned home empty-handed and in humiliation.President Donald J. Trump and Kim Jung-un in 2019 in the Demilitarized Zone. In talks that year, the two failed to reach a deal on North Korea abandoning its nuclear ambitions in return for concessionsErin Schaff/The New York TimesHe then vowed to find a “new way” for his country.Since then, the North has rejected repeated calls from Washington for talks. It has also rejected South Korea as a dialogue partner, indicating from 2022 that it would use nuclear weapons against South Korea in a war and abandoning its long-held insistence that the weapons would keep the Korean Peninsula peaceful as a deterrent. It has tested more diverse, and harder-to-intercept, means of delivering its nuclear warheads.There is doubt that the North has yet built a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile that could target the United States. But two of the North’s main enemies, South Korea and Japan, are much closer.On the diplomatic front, Mr. Kim has taken pains to signal that he no longer views the United States as a critical negotiating partner, instead envisioning a “neo-Cold War” in which the United States is in retreat globally. He has aggressively improved military ties with Russia, and in return has most likely secured Russian promises of food aid and technological help for his weapons programs, officials say.South Korean troops patrol the entrance to a beach on an island near the sea boundary with North Korea.Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“I worry that his confidence might lead him to misjudge with a small act, regardless of his intention, escalating to war amid a tense ‘power-for-power’ confrontation with the United States and its allies,” said Koh Yu-hwan, a former head of the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul.Despite its own increasingly aggressive military posture in recent years, China may prove to be a damper on any North Korean military adventurism.China and North Korea are bound by a treaty signed in 1961 that requires each country to provide military assistance if the other is attacked. But China has little incentive to be drawn into a war in Korea right now.“A war on the Korean Peninsula would be disastrous for Beijing. An entire half-century of peace in East Asia, a period of unprecedented growth for the P.R.C., would come to a crashing halt,” said John Delury, a professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, referring to the People’s Republic of China.The United States has long leaned on Beijing to rein in North Korea. By drawing close to Moscow, Mr. Kim has been putting his own pressure on China’s leader, Xi Jinping.“It is notable that Kim made his first post-pandemic trip to the Russian Far East, skipping China, and he just sent his foreign minister to Moscow, not Beijing,” Mr. Delury said. By raising tensions, Mr. Kim “can see what Xi is willing to do to placate him,” he added.David Pierson More
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Talks initiated with North Korea over US soldier who ran across border
The US-led United Nations Command has initiated talks with North Korea about the American soldier who ran into that country and crossed one of the most militarized borders in the world, according to an official.But a British lieutenant general who helps lead the UN command stopped short of saying exactly when talks about Travis King began, whether they have been constructive or how many exchanges there have been. The lieutenant general, Andrew Harrison, also would not address any known details about King’s health condition.“None of us know where this is going to end – I am, in life, an optimist, and I remain optimistic,” Harrison told reporters at a news conference in the South Korean capital, Seoul. “But … I will leave it at that.”Harrison added that the communications between the UN Command and North Korea about King kicked off through mechanisms which were set up under a 1953 armistice that halted fighting during the Korean war.He did not elaborate, but the Associated Press reported that Harrison may have been referring to a telephone line between the UN Command – which was created to fight that war – and the North Korean People’s Army at Panmunjom, the border truce village where King crossed on 18 July.Harrison’s comments about the beginning of a dialogue centering on King’s fate came about four days after the US said North Korea had been unresponsive to its attempts to start talks.King was supposed to be heading to Fort Bliss, Texas, after finishing a prison sentence in South Korea for assault. Potentially facing discipline from the army as well as discharge from the service, he took a civilian tour of Panmunjom on Tuesday and ran into North Korea.He was reportedly laughing as he bolted across the border separating the Koreas, which technically remain at war because no treaty was ever signed.King, 23, is the first known American to be held in North Korea in nearly five years.The US fought alongside the South during the Korean war and has never set up a diplomatic relationship with the North. The two countries sometimes talk through the armistice telephone line, but North Korea could be reluctant to release King quickly to the US given the political history lurking over the situation, according to experts in some quarters.The last three known American detainees in North Korea were released in 2018. Back then, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, engaged in nuclear diplomacy with the Donald Trump White House.But just a year earlier, the American student Otto Warmbier died within days of his being released in a coma after 17 months in captivity.Warmbier and other American detainees in North Korea were imprisoned over various accusations, including of subversion, anti-state activities and spying.King had served in South Korea as a cavalry scout with the US army’s 1st Armored Division. A court in Seoul sentenced him to prison and fined him 5m won (about $3,900) for assault on an unidentified person as well as damaging a police vehicle.His relatives have said he may have been overwhelmed by his legal issues and potential discharge from the army when – like many tourists do – he programmed a tour of Panmunjom, an area without civilian residents that is jointly overseen by the UN Command and North Korea.King’s detention in North Korea came at a particularly fraught time in that region politically speaking. North Korea on Monday fired two short-range ballistic missiles into the sea off its east coast, the latest in a recent streaks of weapons testing which is apparently meant to protest against naval assets which the US sent to South Korea.The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting More
