3 Steps to a Successful Second Trump-Kim Summit

Daniel R. DePetris

Security, Asia

Washington and Pyongyang must empower their diplomats to hash out the details.

It’s official: after a ninety-minute meeting in the Oval Office last Friday between North Korean Vice Chairman Kim Yong-chol and President Donald Trump, followed by a lunch with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Washington and Pyongyang have announced their intentions for a second summit. In about a month, President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un could be posing for photographs in Vietnam and taking another garden stroll for the television cameras. You can call it the Trump-Kim sequel, the second-act to the ominous first chapter.

Whether the second will be any more productive than the first, however, is very much an open question. The South Korean government of President Moon Jae-in, whose miracle diplomacy has provided both Koreas with at least a slim opportunity to bury the hatchet after sixty-nine years of violent rivalry, is certainly anticipating that Trump and Kim will find it within themselves to strike an agreement that is…well…an actual agreement. The lack of substance from the Singapore summit last June, after which Trump and Kim flew back to their respective capitals with an extremely vague, non-enforceable list of promises in their suit pockets, has deflated much of the optimism in many Washington circles for what can be achieved during a second meeting. Notwithstanding Trump’s assurances to the American people that negotiations with the North are going quite well—“We have made a lot of progress as far as denuclearization is concerned and we’re talking about a lot of different things,” Trump told reporters last weekend—there haven’t been many substantive breakthroughs on the nuclear file as of yet.