Trump and Kim are scheduled to start their meeting at around 9:00 am local time, and they will spend the next hour talking directly, accompanied only by their translators, before they allow their advisers and staff to join the meeting.

The summit is a product of months of diplomacy, going back to the meeting between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the end of March. CIA chief Mike Pompeo, now secretary of state, secretly met with Kim shortly afterward, setting in motion the sometimes tense negotiations that led to Monday’s meeting at the very highest level.

The US and North Korea are still technically at war, and have been since 1953, when an armistice paused the three-year conflict that had devastated the Korean Peninsula and at one point saw US and Chinese troops openly fighting each other.

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