SEOUL, South Korea — President Trump said he would meet on Sunday with Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, at the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas in an extraordinary last-minute get-together intended to revitalize stalled nuclear talks.
Mr. Kim accepted Mr. Trump’s unorthodox invitation, posted on Twitter just a day earlier, for what will be the third time the leaders have gotten together in person. The encounter will be little more than a brief greeting, not an extended negotiation, but it promises a camera-friendly, history-making demonstration of friendship between countries that have been longtime adversaries.
It remained uncertain how the handshake between the two leaders would be orchestrated. Mr. Trump said before leaving Osaka, Japan, on Saturday that he would be perfectly willing to cross over the line into North Korea if need be, which would make him the first sitting American president to visit the long-isolated country, with whom the United States remains technically still at war from the conflict of the 1950s.
Mr. Kim crossed the DMZ in April 2018 to meet with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, becoming the first North Korean leader to step over the line since fighting between the countries ended in 1953. Former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton each visited North Korea, flying into its capital, Pyongyang, but only after they left office.
Mr. Trump met with Mr. Kim in Singapore in June 2018, the first time American and North Korean leaders had met since the war, and produced vague promises to pursue an end to Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal. Their second summit meeting, in Hanoi, Vietnam, ended in failure in February when the two leaders could not agree on a concrete way to pursue that goal.
