Expectations low for Trump-Kim summit

President Donald Trump will head into his second meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un having reframed what would make a successful summit, lowering expectations for Pyongyang’s denuclearization, while eager to declare a flashy victory to offset the political turmoil he faces at home.

Background 

The relationship between the US and North Korea has always been fractious. During the war between North and South Korea in 1950, US forces successfully intervened on behalf of South Korea.

The North Korean nuclear program has been a source of concern for the US and the international community for decades. North Korea has remained an isolated nation and its nuclear program has especially been a concern for the international community. In 2017, North Korea has launched 23 missiles in the course of 16 tests. In November 2017, North Korea after seemingly two months of silence tested its most potent missile yet. The Hwasong-15 missile reached an unprecedented height of almost 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles). The Hwasong-15 is a new type of intercontinental ballistic missile. This represents a serious escalation in the stability of the Korean peninsula.

Trump has taken an aggressive stance while countering North Korea. In 2017, he said that North Korea “will be met with fire and the fury like the world has never seen.” North Korea responded by announcing that plans were underway for it to strike Guam, a US territory. Both Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump were locked in an extended war of words in 2017, with both threatening wars.

2018 saw an unprecedented change in the relation between the two countries as Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un met in Singapore for the first bilateral summit.

Analysis 

President Trump was the driving force behind this week’s Vietnam summit, aiming to re-create the global spectacle of his first meeting with Kim, although that initial summit yielded few concrete results and the months that followed have produced little optimism about what will be achieved in the sequel. He once warned that North Korea’s arsenal posed such a threat to humanity that he may have no choice but to rain “fire and fury” on the rogue nation, yet on Sunday declared that he was in no hurry for Pyongyang to prove it was abandoning its weapons.

Though worries abound across world capitals about what Trump might be willing to give up in the name of a win, the president was ready to write himself into the history books before he and Kim even shake hands in Hanoi. “If I were not elected president, you would have been in a war with North Korea,” Trump said last week. “We now have a situation where the relationships are good — where there has been no nuclear testing, no missiles, no rockets.”

Whatever the North Koreans have done so far, the survival of the Kim regime is always the primary concern.

Kim inherited a nascent, incomplete nuclear program from his father, and after years of accelerated effort and fighting through crippling sanctions, he built an arsenal that demonstrates the potential capability to deliver a thermonuclear weapon to mainland United States. That is the fundamental reason Washington now sits at the negotiating table.

The easing of tensions between the two nations, Trump and his allies believe, stems from the U.S. president’s own unorthodox and unpredictable style of diplomacy. Often prizing personal rapport over long-held strategic interests, Trump has pointed to his budding relationship with the young and reclusive leader, frequently showing visitors to the Oval Office his flattering letters from Kim.

Trump, who has long declared that North Korea represented the gravest foreign threat of his presidency, told reporters recently that his efforts to defang Pyongyang had moved Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize, something Abe would not confirm or deny. And, always with an eye on his media coverage, Trump had delighted in the round-the-clock phenomenon created by the first Kim summit, held last June in Singapore. He urged reluctant aides as early as last fall to begin preparations for a second meeting.

The images of the first face-to-face meeting between a U.S. president and his North Korean counterpart resonated across the globe. Four main goals emerged: establishing new relations between the nations, building a new peace on the Korean Peninsula, completing denuclearization of the peninsula and recovering U.S. POW/MIA remains from the Korean War.

Assessment 

Our assessment is that President Trump is fighting an increasingly uphill domestic battle with the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. We believe that the lowering of expectations from the summit is a way of reducing expectations from the summit, as well as benefit from an upside if there is considerable progress.  

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