Kim Jong-un Invites South Korean Leader to North for Summit

SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, has invited President Moon Jae-in of South Korea to visit his country “at an early date” for a summit meeting, Mr. Moon’s office announced on Saturday.

Mr. Moon said the two Koreas should “work together to create the environment to make it happen,” a spokesman said.

Mr. Kim relayed the invitation through his trusted adviser and only sister, Kim Yo-jong, who met with Mr. Moon at the presidential Blue House in Seoul on Saturday, in the highest-level contact between the two Koreas in years. She is part of an official North Korean delegation to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, and she attended the opening ceremony of the Games on Friday.

Her brother’s invitation to Mr. Moon, who has been eager to pursue dialogue with the North, raised the prospect of détente between the two Koreas after more than a year of rising tensions spurred by Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile tests, and by President Trump’s threats to use military force to end the crisis.

But the overture also has the potential to divide South Korea from the United States, its main military ally. The Trump administration has discouraged South Korea from engaging with the North unless it shows clear signs of giving up its nuclear weapons program.

Vice President Mike Pence, who was also at the Olympic opening ceremony (and sat just feet away from Ms. Kim, neither apparently speaking to the other), has been critical of the North’s participation in the Games, seeing it as an attempt to create just such a division.

In his message to Mr. Moon, Mr. Kim “said he was willing to meet President Moon Jae-in at an early date and asked him to visit North Korea at a convenient date,” said Kim Eui-kyeom, the spokesman for Mr. Moon.

Mr. Moon has said he was willing to meet Kim Jong-un only if he received assurance from the North that it would help resolve the crisis over the North’s nuclear weapons program. The exchange between Ms. Kim, who was visiting Seoul as her brother’s “special envoy,” and Mr. Moon indicated that the Koreas would soon begin high-level negotiations on the terms of a possible summit meeting.

“The South and North shared an understanding that they should continue the positive mood for peace and recognition created by the Pyeongchang Olympics and should promote inter-Korean dialogue, exchanges and cooperation,” Mr. Moon’s office said in a statement.

Mr. Moon also urged North Korea to talk to the United States, his office said. In the past, he has said that there was a limit to how much the Koreas’ ties could improve without a resolution of the nuclear weapons issue. In a news conference last month, he said he was not interested in “talks for talks’ sake.”

“If we are going to have a summit meeting, there has to be an atmosphere created for a summit meeting and there has to be some level of confidence that it would bring about some results,” Mr. Moon said then.

He seemed to make a similar point on Saturday, by referring to the need to “create the environment” for talks.

Still, Mr. Moon’s government is clearly more optimistic than the Trump administration about the potential for the Koreas’ cooperation at the Olympics to create the groundwork for more substantial discussions. At a reception on Friday, Mr. Moon pointed to the joint Korean women’s ice hockey team — an Olympic first — as a starting point.

“The female ice hockey players from the two Koreas are now holding a small snowball in their hands,” he said. “Now, if we put our hearts and minds together, it will continue to grow larger and larger and turn into a snowman of peace.” Mr. Moon was scheduled to join North Korean officials on Saturday in cheering for the team against Switzerland.

Mr. Pence, by contrast, avoided speaking with North Korean officials on Friday, and he and his wife did not stand, as most spectators did, when the athletes from both Koreas marched together under a flag representing a unified Korea. Earlier Friday, Mr. Pence met with defectors from the North and invited them to tell their stories of repression under Pyongyang.

Mr. Moon would like to bring both North Korea and the United States to the negotiating table. China has suggested that talks could start if the United States suspended its regular joint military exercises with South Korea, and if North Korea reciprocated by shelving nuclear and missile tests.

But both sides have held their ground. North Korea has said that its nuclear weapons are not for bargaining away. In a speech that Mr. Kim gave on New Year’s Day, in which he first raised the possibility of the North participating in the Olympics, he vowed to “mass-produce” nuclear weapons and missiles.

Mr. Pence reiterated on Friday that the North must “put denuclearization on the table and take concrete steps with the world community to dismantle, permanently and irreversibly, their nuclear and ballistic missile programs.”

“Then, and only then, will the world community consider negotiating and making changes in the sanctions regime that’s placed on them today,” Mr. Pence said after a meeting with Mr. Moon.

The United States has also opposed suspending its joint military exercises with the South, though it agreed to delay drills scheduled for February until the Olympics are over. Shinzo Abe, the prime minister of Japan, asked Mr. Moon on Friday to hold the exercises soon after the Games end, but Mr. Moon told Mr. Abe not to meddle in South Korea’s “sovereignty and internal affairs,” South Korean officials said.

If Mr. Moon accepts Mr. Kim’s offer to come to the North, it will be the third summit meeting ever held between the two Koreas. Kim Jong-il, Mr. Kim’s father, had met with two South Korean presidents in Pyongyang before his death in 2011: with President Kim Dae-jung in 2000, and with President Roh Moo-hyun in 2007.

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