SEOUL, June 17 (Reuters) – South Korean President Lee Jae Myung asked U.S. President Donald Trump to take the lead in seeking a peaceful resolution of tensions with North Korea during a brief exchange at the Group of Seven summit on Tuesday, Lee’s office said.
The two leaders greeted each other during a G7 leaders’ group photo, presidential spokesperson Kang Yu-jung said, where Trump asked Lee about the current state of relations with North Korea.
Lee asked Trump to lead efforts to resolve the North Korea issue peacefully, as he had done with the war in the Middle East, according to Lee’s office. Trump responded that he would work to address the North Korea issue, Kang said.
Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un held three meetings during Trump’s first term, including a landmark summit in Singapore in 2018, a second summit in Hanoi in 2019 and a meeting later that year at the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, where Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to step into North Korea.
The diplomacy collapsed after the Hanoi summit failed to produce an agreement on dismantling North Korea’s nuclear programme and easing U.S.-led sanctions.
Trump has repeatedly signalled interest in reviving direct diplomacy with Kim. He said in August 2025 that he looked forward to seeing the North Korean leader “in the appropriate future”, and also said in October he would “love” to meet Kim again.
Trump last week posted a captionless photo of himself with Kim Jong Un on Truth Social, in an apparent reminder of their past diplomacy.
(Reporting by Joyce Lee; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
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