US President Donald Trump is looking forward to another summit with Kim Jong-un, he said on Wednesday, after the North Korean leader warned Pyongyang could change its approach to nuclear talks if America persists with sanctions.

“We really established a very good relationship,” Mr Trump told a cabinet meeting.

“We’ll probably have another meeting.”

The two leaders made global headlines with an unprecedented summit in Singapore in June, where they signed a vaguely-worded pledge on denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.

But progress has since stalled with the two sides disagreeing over what the declaration means, and the pace of US-North Korean negotiations has slowed, with meetings and visits cancelled at short notice.

The North is demanding relief from the multiple sanctions imposed on it over its banned nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, and has condemned US insistence on its nuclear disarmament as “gangster-like.”

Speculation of a second Trump-Kim summit has ebbed and flowed, with the US president saying that he hoped it would take place early this year.

But a proposed visit by Kim to Seoul before the end of December did not materialise.

Culminating in late 2017, the North has carried out six atomic blasts and launched rockets capable of reaching the entire US mainland, but has now carried out no such tests for more than a year.

In his New Year speech Kim called for the sanctions to be eased, saying that the North had declared “we would neither make and test nuclear weapons any longer nor use and proliferate them,” and urged the US to take “corresponding practical actions.”

If Washington instead continues with the measures, he added, “we may be compelled to find a new way for defending the sovereignty of the country and the supreme interests of the state.” He was willing to meet Mr Trump at any time, he said.

Kim’s remarks were “apparently designed to revive the momentum of the negotiations,” South Korea’s centrist Hankook Ilbo newspaper said in an editorial Wednesday.

But he was also “signalling that he would never be pushed around”, it added. Joshua Pollack of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies tweeted that Kim was insisting “the onus is now on the US to deliver”.

“The bottom line: Kim remains dug into the same positions on nuclear diplomacy he has occupied over the last six months,” he added.