In an unprecedented summit, President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met in Singapore on Tuesday and signed a document pledging “to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” but provided few details of how that might work.

You read that, and you probably say to yourself, “This does not belong on a blog about MMA.” And normally you would be right.

Except UFC President Dana White went ahead and shared this on Instagram:

As you probably know, Trump and White are boys, so much so that White says if UFC interim champion Colby Covington wants to bring his belt to the White House, the UFC boss can make that happen.

What could White’s Photoshop masterpiece mean? Maybe he knew Democrats would come after Trump, and it means, “Don’t talk to him.” I don’t know. What do you think?

Lots of people on Twitter had jokes.

The Blue Corner is MMAjunkie’s blog space. We don’t take it overly seriously, and neither should you. If you come complaining to us that something you read here is not hard-hitting news, expect to have the previous sentence repeated in ALL CAPS.</s>North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump have arrived at the summit venue Singapore. The historic first meeting of the two leaders will discuss a peace treaty and denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Kim arrived first at the Capella Resort, on Singapore’s Sentosa Island, shortly before 9 am local time. He ignored the cameras, walking into the hotel with eyeglasses in hand. Trump followed a few minutes later, turning to face the cameras with a carefully neutral expression before he entered the venue.

The historic handshake of the two leaders before a row of US and North Korean flags took place at 9:04. Trump smiled and patted Kim on the back, ushering him towards the conference room. Trump said earlier he would know whether the summit would succeed within the first few minutes of meeting with Kim.

“We will have a great relationship, I have no doubt,” Trump said in a brief photo-op.

“Past practices and prejudices were obstacles on our way forward, but we overcame all of them and are here today,” Kim said. “That’s true,” quipped Trump.

The two are scheduled to meet for two hours in private, accompanied only by their translators.</s>President Donald Trump says he and Trudeau just ‘shook hands’

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets with U.S. President Donald Trump at the G7 leaders summit in La Malbaie, Que., on Friday, June 8, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

U.S. President Donald Trump says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s assertion that Canada “will not be pushed around” will end up costing Canadians “a lot of money.”

Trump gave a wide-ranging news conference in Singapore on Tuesday following his landmark summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, in which the two leaders spoke for several hours.

Among the many topics the president addressed with reporters afterward was his recent Twitter campaign against Trudeau, whom he has called “dishonest” and “weak.”

Those comments came after Trudeau’s closing news conference at the G7 summit in Quebec on Saturday, when the prime minister said he had pushed back against the Trump administration’s tariffs on steel and aluminum.

Trump says he watched that news conference on his way to Singapore, and was upset because he thought he and Trudeau had had a positive meeting in Charlevoix.

Trump says Trudeau “probably didn’t know that Air Force One has about 20 televisions.

“I see the television and he’s giving a news conference about how he ‘will not be pushed around’ by the United States. And I say, ‘Push him around? We just shook hands!’” Trump said Tuesday.

“We finished the (G7) meeting and really everybody was happy.”

Trump has consistently railed against what he claims are unfair trade practices by some of America’s biggest trade partners, including Canada.

One particular source of his ire recently has been Canada’s supply management system, which levels tariffs of up to 300 per cent on imported dairy products.

“It’s very unfair to our farmers, and it’s very unfair to the people of our country,” Trump said Tuesday in Singapore.

“It’s very unfair, and it’s very unfair to our workers, and I’m gonna straighten it out. And it won’t even be tough.”

Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.</s>The two leaders will initially meet alone, with only translators, away from the prying eyes of the world. Picture: AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon

The two leaders will initially meet alone, with only translators, away from the prying eyes of the world. Picture: AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon

DONALD Trump and Kim Jong-un were never going to have a conventional meeting, but the headstrong pair have already dropped some bombshells as they prepare for their summit.

The two leaders will appear for a much-anticipated greeting in front of the media on Tuesday at 9am in Singapore (11am AEST), but the photo op will be followed by an hour-long, one-on-one meeting with only their translators.

It's an unusual and frustrating move for a world hanging on every detail of their interaction, and has caused fears among security experts of a he-said-she-said scenario.

The intimate tete-a-tete at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa Island will then give way to a bilateral meeting with top officials from both countries, followed by a working lunch with an even larger group.

In another unexpected twist, the US President revealed on the eve of the summit that he will leave Singapore a day earlier than planned, after nuclear negotiations moved "more quickly than expected."

The pair had not even met when he made the announcement, although US and North Korean officials spent Monday setting goals and possible outcomes at the Ritz Carlton hotel.

Mr Trump will participate in a media briefing after the summit before departing in the evening for the United States.

On Monday evening, Kim left his luxury St Regis hotel for the first time since he met the city-state's prime minister Lee Hsien Loong after his arrival on Sunday. The North Korean leader - who rarely travels - was surrounded by security guards, a media scrum and cheering crowds as he embarked on an evening tour of attractions on the city's waterfront.

Kim's motorcade headed to the world-famous Marina Bay Sands Hotel, before he and his sister Kim Yo-jong visited the Esplanade, Jubilee Bridge and the Gardens by the Bay, where the reclusive leader posed for selfies with Singaporean government officials.

Mr Trump met with Mr Lee on Monday and attended a working lunch, telling the Singaporean PM: "We've got a very interesting meeting in particular tomorrow, and I think things can work out very nicely."

The US President was presented with an early birthday cake and blew out the candles ahead of his 72nd on June 14, before returning to the Shangri-La Hotel to work.

The US delegation at the larger meeting on Tuesday will include Mr Pompeo, Chief of Staff John Kelly, and National Security Advisor John Bolton.

Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, Ambassador Sung Kim, and National Security Council Senior Director for Asia Matt Pottinger will attend the working lunch.

Former NBA star Dennis Rodman arrived in Singapore at around midnight, hours before Tuesday morning's summit. The White House said he would play no official role in negotiations, but the athlete has promised to "give whatever support is needed" to his "friends" Mr Trump and Kim.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo earlier seemed to play down expectations for the meeting, which Mr Trump had predicted could yield an instant end to the Korean War.

Mr Trump called the leaders of South Korea and Japan in advance of the summit but South Korean President Moon Jae-in would have to be present if a declaration ending the conflict was to be signed, and he has no current plans to join Mr Trump and Kim.

Mr Pompeo suggested the summit might have little concrete success other than to pave the way for further meetings.

The Secretary of State told reporters the US was prepared to take action to provide North Korea with "sufficient certainty" that denuclearisation "is not something that ends badly for them."

He would not say whether that included the possibility of withdrawing troops from the Korean Peninsula, but stressed the discussions were "radically different than ever before"

He said the US was "prepared to take what will be security assurances that are different, unique, than America's been willing to provide previously."

Mr Trump has already made it clear the summit is a "one-time shot" and said he would know within minutes of meeting Kim whether an agreement was going to be reached or not. But he also said the summit would be part of a "process".

He told reporters he hadn't prepared "very much" because, "I will know, just my touch, my feel. That's what I do."

Asked on Saturday about his aims, he said: "Well, I think the minimum would be relationship. You would start at least a dialogue, because, you know, as a deal person, I have done very well with deals."

The North has faced crippling international sanctions as it has developed its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

There is deep scepticism over whether Kim will easily abandon his nuclear weapons program, but experts hope diplomacy can replace the animosity between the US and the Hermit Kingdom.

With the summit already dramatically cancelled and reinstated, anything appears to be possible from this clash of two unpredictable men.

Mr Trump also made an unexpected exit from the Group of 7 meeting in Canada, insulting host Justin Trudeau and removing the US from the group statement.</s>When South Korea's president shuttled between North Korea and the United States to broker their first-ever summit, he faced both praise and criticism over whether he was a peace-making mediator or was helping North Korea find ways to weaken U.S.-led economic sanctions.

A day after President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un held their summit in Singapore, is it clearer whether Moon Jae-in played a positive or negative role? A quick answer: Probably not.

Assessments of Moon's diplomacy have become more divisive and complex, with Trump criticized in both South Korea and the U.S. for the concessions he made to North Korea, while others believe the summit will successfully prolong the current mood of detente.

Meeting for about five hours, Trump and Kim exchanged an historic handshake, took a short stroll together, patted each other's backs and signed a summit agreement. Trump promised to provide security guarantees to the North and suspend joint military drills with the South as long as negotiations with the North continue in "good faith." Kim, in return, agreed to work toward a vague "complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."

Those moves were unthinkable even several months ago, when the two unpredictable leaders threatened to nuke each other and traded a series of harsh personal insults.

Moon issued a statement after the summit calling it a "huge step forward" toward peace that "helped break down the last remaining Cold War legacy on Earth."

He acknowledged that many difficulties are likely to lie ahead but vowed to work together with the U.S., North Korea and others to bring lasting peace to the Korean Peninsula.

"We will never go back to the past again and never give up on this bold journey. History is a record of people who take action and rise to a challenge," he said.

But conservatives in South Korea slammed the summit, saying it failed to curb North Korea's nuclear ambitions. They said both Trump and Moon should be blamed for not specifying steps and deadlines for North Korea's nuclear disarmament, allowing it time to perfect its weapons program.

"High expectations were met by low results," said Nam Sung-wook, a North Korea expert at Seoul's Korea University. "Moon, and then Trump, were quick to bite on North Korea's invitation for talks. When Trump realized there wasn't going to be anything substantial in return, it was impossible for him to back out because he had already gone too far."

U.S. officials had worked hard to get North Korea to agree to "complete, verifiable and irreversible" disarmament, and said they would not offer any major concessions until it took meaningful steps. Despite those efforts, Trump announced after the summit that he had agreed to suspend U.S. military drills with South Korea, something North Korea has long demanded.

On Wednesday, North Korean state media said Trump had also agreed to the North's desire for a step-by-step disarmament process with corresponding U.S. concessions at each step, rather than immediate disarmament as the U.S. had initially sought.

Trump's agreement to suspend the military drills apparently came without prior consultation with South Korea, baffling many who believe the U.S.-South Korea alliance, forged in blood during the 1950-53 Korean War, should remain strong throughout the push for a negotiated end to the nuclear tensions.

"Why did South Korea and the U.S. form an alliance and stage military drills before the nuclear crisis flared? It's because North Korea has been belligerent," said Kim Taewoo, former president of the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul. He said cancellation of the drills "is really a bad idea ... and (Trump) betrayed our people."

Asked to respond to Trump's decision, Moon spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom said the allies must consider a "variety of ways to further facilitate dialogue" during the nuclear negotiations. He said South Korea is still trying to figure out the exact meaning and intent of Trump's comments.

Since taking office in May last year, Moon, a son of North Korean refugees, has sought to take the lead in diplomatic efforts to end the North Korean nuclear standoff, which had been dominated by world powers including the U.S. and China.

Provocative nuclear and missile tests by North Korea last year initially gave Moon little diplomatic room to maneuver. But he kept trying to reach out to North Korea, and eventually found a role as a mediator after Kim offered in January to send a delegation to the South Korean Winter Olympics.

After successful cooperation at the Olympics, Moon sent special envoys to North Korea who later traveled to Washington with Kim's proposal for a summit with Trump. Moon held talks with Kim in April at which Kim agreed to work toward "complete denuclearization." He met Kim again in May when Trump said he was withdrawing from the planned summit with Kim — a decision Trump quickly reversed.

Experts now expect a temporary peace to continue since North Korea has probably won what it wanted from Tuesday's summit and Trump is unlikely to back down from summit deals that he wants to portray as a diplomatic triumph.

Analyst Hong Min at Seoul's Korea Institute for National Unification said critics of the joint statement signed by Trump and Kim are missing a bigger point.

He said it's meaningful in itself that the leaders of the United States and North Korea met, talked and signed an agreement that will carry more weight and significance than any pact previously made between the wartime foes. The agreement's aspirational language on denuclearization was a "strategic decision" to reduce pressure on both sides and keep the process going, Hong said.

Trump and Kim agreed that their countries will quickly engage in follow-up talks led by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a "relevant high-level" North Korean official.

Bong Youngshik, a professor at Seoul's Yonsei University, said it's too early to predict how Trump's cancellation of the military drills will play out in future nuclear negotiations. He said North Korea is likely to consider Trump's decision a temporary measure while it remains in negotiations with Washington.

Moon may not face any immediate serious political repercussions at home since North Korea will likely take gradual steps toward disarmament to prevent others from thinking it reneged on its pledge. But if Trump seeks re-election in 2020, his government is likely to apply more pressure on North Korea to make substantial progress in denuclearization, which could bring the nuclear issue to another critical point, said Shin Beomchul of Seoul's Asan Institute for Policy Studies.</s>Trump says denuclearization must be verifiable

SINGAPORE (AP) - President Donald Trump is telling reporters that North Korea's denuclearization will have to be total and verifiable as he prepares to head home from his historic summit with Kim Jong Un.

Trump spoke with reporters on Tuesday shortly before Air Force One took off from Singapore after a day of meetings with Kim. Trump says the U.S. would have to verify North Korea's denuclearization.

He says: "We're going to have to check it. We will check it. Total and complete."

Trump is heading home a day earlier than expected. He said he didn't want to stay an extra night when everything he'd set out to do had been accomplished.

He says, "There was nothing more we could have done." Trump will be stopping in Guam and Hawaii as he makes his way back to Washington</s>US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had made “a lot of progress” and said the two sides expected to sign an unspecified agreement.

[SINGAPORE] US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un pledged on Tuesday to work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula while Washington committed to provide security guarantees for its old enemy.

“President Mr Trump committed to provide security guarantees to the DPRK and Chairman Kim Jong Un reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula,” said a joint statement issued after their historic summit in Singapore.

DPRK is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the formal name of North Korea.

Mr Trump said he expected the denuclearisation process to start “very, very quickly”. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and North Korean officials would hold follow-up negotiations “at the earliest possible date”, the statement said.

It however did not give any details on how denuclearisation would be achieved. The document also made no mention of the international sanctions that have crippled North Korea’s economy, for pursuing its nuclear weapons programme.

Nor was there any reference to finally signing a peace treaty. The combatants of the 1950-53 Korean War are technically still at war, as the conflict, in which millions of people died, was concluded only with a truce.

But the joint statement did say the two sides had agreed to recovering the remains of prisoners of war and those missing in action and repatriating them.

If the joint statement does lead to a lasting detente, it could fundamentally change the security landscape of Northeast Asia, just as former US President Richard Nixon visit to Beijing in 1972 led to the transformation of China.

Before signing what Mr Trump described as a “comprehensive”document, Mr Kim said the two leaders had a historic meeting “and decided to leave the past behind. The world will see a major change.” Mr Trump said he had formed a “very special bond” with Mr Kim and that relationship with North Korea would be very different.

“People are going to be very impressed and people are going to be very happy and we are going to take care of a very dangerous problem for the world,” Mr Trump said.

Asked whether he would invite Mr Kim to the White House, Mr Trump said: “Absolutely, I will.” He called Mr Kim “very smart” and a “very worthy, very hard negotiator.”

“I learned he’s a very talented man. I also learned that he loves his country very much.”

During a post-lunch stroll through the gardens of the Singapore hotel where the summit was held, Mr Trump said the meeting had gone “better than anybody could have expected”.

Mr Kim stood silently alongside, but the North Korean leader had earlier described their summit as a “a good prelude to peace”.

Both men walked to Mr Trump’s bullet-proof limousine, nicknamed“The Beast”, and looked in at the rear seat, with Mr Trump apparently showing Mr Kim something inside. They then resumed their walk.

They had appeared cautious and serious when they first arrived for the summit at the Capella hotel on Singapore’s Sentosa, a resort island with luxury hotels, a casino, manmade beaches and a Universal Studios theme park.

But, with cameras of the world’s press trained on them, they displayed an initial atmosphere of bonhomie as they met on the verandah of the Capella, a refurbished 19th century British regimental officers’ mess.

Body language expert said both men tried to project command as they met, but also displayed signs of nerves.

After a handshake, they were soon smiling and holding each other by the arm, before Mr Trump guided Mr Kim to the library where they held a meeting with only their interpreters. Mr Trump had said on Saturday he would know within a minute of meeting Mr Kim whether he would reach a deal.

Inside, they sat alongside each other against a backdrop of North Korean and US flags, with Kim beaming broadly as the .US president gave him a thumbs up.

After initial exchanges lasting around 40 minutes, Mr Trump and Mr Kim emerged, walking side-by-side through the colonnaded hotel before entering a meeting room, where they were joined by their most senior officials.

Mr Kim was heard telling Mr Trump through a translator: “I think the entire world is watching this moment. Many people in the world will think of this as a scene from a fantasy...science fiction movie.”

The US dollar jumped to a 3-week top on Tuesday and Asian shares rose on the news.

Mr Trump was joined by Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton, and John Kelly, White House Chief of Staff, for the expanded talks, while Kim’s team included former military intelligence chief Kim Yong Chol, foreign minister Ri Yong Ho and Ri Su Yong, vice chairman of the ruling Workers’ Party.

As the two leaders met, Singapore navy vessels, and air force Apache helicopters patrolled, while fighter jets and an Gulfstream 550 early warning aircraft circled.

After the meetings, the two teams and other senior officials met for a working lunch, where beef short ribs, sweet and sour pork and “Daegu Jormin”, or Korean braised cod, were served for the main course, according to the menu. That was to be followed by dark chocolate tarts, pastries and vanilla ice cream for dessert. The North Korean leader’s sister and close confidante Kim Yo Jong was among the lunch party.

As the cameras captured the moment, Mr Trump quipped: “Very nice. Getting a good picture everyone, so we all look nice and handsome and thin...perfect”.

In the hours before the summit began, Mr Trump expressed optimism about prospects for the first-ever meeting of sitting U.S. and North Korean leaders, while Pompeo injected a note of caution whether Mr Kim would prove to be sincere about his willingness to denuclearise.

Pompeo said the summit should set the framework for “the hard work that will follow”, insisting that North Korea had to move toward complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation.

North Korea, however, has shown little appetite for surrendering nuclear weapons it considers vital to the survival of Kim’s dynastic rule.

Sanctions on North Korea would remain in place until that happened, Mr Pompeo said on Monday. “If diplomacy does not move in the right direction ... those measures will increase.”

The White House said later that discussions with North Korea had moved “more quickly than expected” and Mr Trump would leave Singapore on Tuesday night after the summit, rather than Wednesday, as scheduled earlier.

Mr Kim was due to leave on Tuesday afternoon, a source involved in the planning of his visit has said.

Mr Trump spoke to Moon and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, both key allies of Washington in the region, to discuss developments ahead of the summit.

“I too, got little sleep last night,” Mr Moon told his cabinet in Seoul as the summit began in Singapore.

“I truly hope it will be a successful summit that will open a new age for the two Koreas and the United States and bring us complete denuclearisation and peace.”</s>SINGAPORE (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump made a stunning concession to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Tuesday about halting military exercises, pulling a surprise at a summit that baffled allies, military officials and lawmakers from his own Republican Party.

At a news conference after the historic meeting with Kim in Singapore, Trump announced he would halt what he called “very provocative” and expensive regular military exercises that the United States holds with South Korea.

That was sure to rattle close allies South Korea and Japan. North Korea has long sought an end to the war games.

The two leaders promised in a joint statement after their meeting to work towards the “denuclearisation” of the Korean Peninsula and the United States promised its Cold War foe security guarantees, but they offered few specifics.

The summit, the first between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader, was in stark contrast to a flurry of North Korean nuclear and missile tests and angry exchanges of insults between Trump and Kim last year that fuelled worries about war.

Noting past North Korean promises to denuclearise, many analysts cast doubt on how effective Trump had been at obtaining Washington’s pre-summit goal of getting North Korea to undertake complete, verifiable and irreversible steps to scrap a nuclear arsenal that is advanced enough to threaten the United States.

Critics at home said the U.S. president had given away too much at a meeting that gave international standing to Kim. The North Korean leader is deeply isolated, his country accused by rights groups of widespread human rights abuses and under U.N. sanctions for its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.

If implemented, the halting of the joint military exercises would be one of the most controversial moves to come from the summit. The drills help keep U.S. forces at a state of readiness in one of the world’s most tense flashpoints.

“We will be stopping the war games which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should. But we’ll be saving a tremendous amount of money, plus I think it’s very provocative,” Trump said.

His announcement was a surprise even to President Moon Jae-in’s government in Seoul, which worked in recent months to help bring about the Trump-Kim summit.

The presidential Blue House said it needed “to find out the precise meaning or intentions” of Trump’s statement, while adding that it was willing to “explore various measures to help the talks move forward more smoothly”.

Pentagon officials were not immediately able to provide any details about Trump’s remarks about suspending drills, something that the U.S. military has long resisted.

A spokeswoman for U.S. military forces in Korea said it had not received any direction to cease joint military drills.

“USFK has received no updated guidance on execution or cessation of training exercises – to include this fall’s scheduled Ulchi Freedom Guardian,” U.S. Forces in Korea spokeswoman Lieutenant Colonel Jennifer Lovett said in a statement.

One South Korean official said he initially thought Trump had misspoken.

“I was shocked when he called the exercises ‘provocative,’ a very unlikely word to be used by a U.S. president,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because it was a politically sensitive issue.

Current and former U.S. defence officials expressed concern at the possibility that the United States would unilaterally halt military exercises without an explicit concession from North Korea that lowers the threat from Pyongyang.

The U.S.-South Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every year with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month.

The Republican chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, said it was difficult to assess what had happened at the summit.

“While I am glad the president and Kim Jong Un were able to meet, it is difficult to determine what of concrete nature has occurred,” Corker said in a statement.

Speaking about the military excercises, Corker told Reuters: “I don’t know if that’s an agreement or an ad hoc statement that was made. It wasn’t in the agreement and sometimes things are said and walked back after talking to people at the Pentagon and other places.”

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, called North Korea a “brutal regime” and urged Trump to continue “maximum economic pressure” as negotiations advance.

U.S. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer faulted Trump’s agreement with Kim as short on details, saying the United States gave up “substantial leverage.”

World stock markets were little changed on Tuesday while the U.S. dollar fell slightly against an index of major currencies, as investors brushed aside the summit.

The two leaders smiled and shook hands at their meeting at the Capella hotel on Singapore’s resort island of Sentosa, and Trump spoke in warm terms of Kim at his news conference afterward.

Just a few months ago, Kim was an international pariah accused of ordering the killing of his uncle, a half-brother and hundreds of officials suspected of disloyalty. Tens of thousands of North Koreans are imprisoned in labour camps.

The leaders’ joint statement did not refer to human rights, although Trump said he had raised the issue with Kim, and he believed the North Korean leader wanted to “do the right thing”.

Trump said he expected the denuclearisation process to start “very, very quickly” and it would be verified by “having a lot of people in North Korea”.

He said Kim had announced that North Korea was destroying a major missile engine-testing site, but sanctions on North Korea would stay in place for now.

It was unclear if negotiations would lead to denuclearisation, or end with broken promises, as happened in the past, said Anthony Ruggiero, senior fellow at Washington’s Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.

“This looks like a restatement of where we left negotiations more than 10 years ago and not a major step forward,” he said.

The joint statement said Trump “committed to provide security guarantees” to North Korea and Kim “reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula”.

North Korea has long rejected unilateral nuclear disarmament, instead referring to the denuclearisation of the peninsula. That has always been interpreted as a call for the United States to remove its “nuclear umbrella” protecting South Korea and Japan.

Kim said after the summit he and Trump had “decided to leave the past behind. The world will see a major change.”

Trump’s meeting with Kim followed days of him berating traditional U.S. allies such as Canada and Germany in trade disputes. He left a Group of Seven summit in Canada early last weekend, and described host Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “very dishonest and weak.”

Trump and Kim’s joint statement made no mention of the sanctions on North Korea and nor was there any reference to formally ending the 1950-53 Korean War, which killed millions of people and ended in a truce.

But it did say the two sides had agreed to recover the remains of prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action, so they could be repatriated.

Daniel Russel, formerly the State Department’s top Asia diplomat under the Obama administration, said the absence of any reference to the North’s ballistic missiles was “glaring.”

“Trading our defence of South Korea for a promise is a lopsided deal that past presidents could have made but passed on,” he said.

Trump said China, North Korea’s main ally, would welcome the progress he and Kim had made.

Li Nan, senior researcher at Pangoal, a Beijing-based Chinese public policy think tank, said the meeting had only symbolic significance.

“There is no concrete detail on the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and the provision of security guarantees by the United States,” Li said. “It is too early to call it a turning point in North Korea-U.S. relations.”

Trump said he had formed a “very special bond” with Kim and relations with North Korea would be very different in future. He called Kim “very smart” and a “very worthy, very hard negotiator”.</s>President Donald Trump steps off Air Force One as he arrived Wednesday, June 13, 2018, at Andrews Air Force Base, Md.

President Donald Trump claimed that "there is no longer a nuclear threat" from North Korea after arriving back in Washington from Singapore where he met with Kim Jong Un for a historic summit.

Trump landed at Andrews Air Force Base early Wednesday and fired off a series of tweets about the meeting.

"Everybody can now feel much safer," he said. "Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer."

Trump's optimism for what the summit achieved comes amid skepticism from his critics on whether he gave away too much in return for too little by agreeing to share a stage with Kim, a known human rights abuser whose regime has failed repeatedly to live up to diplomatic promises.

Trump and Kim signed a joint statement in which North Korea pledged to denuclearize, but there were few specifics on how and when that would happen. Much of the text repeated past vows to work toward a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.

There were also concerns from key U.S. allies Japan and South Korea after Trump agreed to halt American military exercises with South Korea, which North Korea has long claimed were invasion preparations. Both Japan and South Korea have large U.S. military presences in their countries. It was also a concession to Kim that appeared to catch the Pentagon and officials in Japan and South Korea off guard.

More: U.S. will suspend military drills with South Korea, but can be restarted quickly

"The U.S.-South Korea joint exercises and U.S. forces in South Korea play significant roles for the security in East Asia," Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera told reporters Wednesday.

Past American presidents have refused face-to-face meetings with North Korea's leadership over fears of legitimizing a totalitarian state that has admitted to state-sponsored kidnapping and sent thousands of its citizens to forced labor camps.

Trump has appeared willing to overlook those issues in his quest to convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. "I did it because nuclear is always number one to me," he said during a news conference in Singapore Tuesday.

Trump's enthusiasm for the agreement comes despite North Korea having taken no verified, concrete steps toward denuclearization. It also mirrors the zeal of the state media in Pyongyang. Newspapers Wednesday ran photos of Trump and Kim standing side-by-side on the world stage and touted an "epoch-making meeting much awaited by the whole world."

More: The handshake, denuclearization and another summit: Six things to know from the Trump-Kim summit

More: Analysis: When Trump met Kim, the handshake was more historic than the words

More: Trump to Kim Jong Un: 'You could have the best hotels in the world' if you give up nukes</s>SINGAPORE (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday the United States was stopping “very provocative” and costly military exercises with South Korea to facilitate denuclearization negotiations with North Korea.

The United States and its ally South Korea hold regular military exercises to the fury of North Korea, which has long seen the drills as preparations to invade it.

“The war games are very expensive, we pay for the majority of them,” Trump told a news conference in Singapore after a historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“Under the circumstances, that we’re negotiating ... I think it’s inappropriate to be having war games.”
U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un meet for a historic summit on Sentosa Island in Singapore. This marks the first time that the leaders of both countries have met.