North Korean state media have raised the possibility that the isolated country could “establish a new relationship” with the United States.
It comes a day before North Korean leader Kim Jong-un meets US President Donald Trump for historic talks. The comments mark a shift in tone from North Korea after decades of animosity towards the US.
Meanwhile Mr Trump has said he has a “good feeling” about Tuesday’s much-anticipated summit. Both leaders arrived for the talks – the first ever between a sitting US president and a North Korean leader – in Singapore on Sunday.
Mr Trump tweeted on Monday morning that there was “excitement in the air” ahead of the summit. He hopes the meeting will kick-start a process that eventually sees Mr Kim give up nuclear weapons. But North Korea’s perspective has always been more opaque.
Later on Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the US was willing to offer “unique” security guarantees to North Korea so the isolated state would know that denuclearisation was “not something that ends badly for them”.
He stressed that the US objective of the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula had not changed.
Singapore’s Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, who met Mr Trump and Mr Kim separately on Sunday evening, said that both leaders were feeling “supremely confident” ahead of their meeting.
Preparation for the unprecedented summit has been both frenzied and unusual. A meeting of this kind is usually reserved as the end result of months of discussions and diplomacy. Few details of the agenda have been released and they continue to be fleshed out on the eve of the summit.
Mr Pompeo said that senior officials from both countries were meeting in Singapore on Monday and those talks “were moving quite rapidly”.
The US president and North Korean leader are staying in separate hotels, not far from each other, and will meet on Tuesday at a hotel on Sentosa, a popular tourist island a few hundred metres off the main island of Singapore.
Mr Balakrishnan confirmed that Singapore was paying for the North Korean delegation’s stay, describing it as “hospitality that we would have offered”.
Denuclearisation has been the central issue in the run-up to the talks. The US wants North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, but North Korea is widely expected to resist that and it is unclear what it might ask for in return.
Mr Kim has also said he wants to focus on building the North Korean economy – and thus wants sanctions relief and international investment. The question is what concessions he is willing to make, and whether he will stick to any promises made.
Still, the US is not necessarily expecting to get a final deal in Singapore. President Trump has described it as a “get-to-know-you situation” and said “it’s going to be a process”.