The Trump-Kim Summit in Hanoi: What Do Experts in China Think?

David Axe

Security,

One Chinese foreign-policy expert expressed optimism the United States and North Korea can reach a deal over Pyongyang's nuclear arsenal. Non-Chinese experts were less sanguine.

One Chinese foreign-policy expert expressed optimism the United States and North Korea can reach a deal over Pyongyang's nuclear arsenal. Non-Chinese experts were less sanguine.

U.S. president Donald Trump on Feb. 28, 2019 abruptly walked away from his meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un after just two days of discussion.

The summit in Hanoi came less than a year after Trump and Kim met in Singapore and pledged to work toward denuclearization and a lasting peace on the Korean peninsula.

"Despite the setback during the Hanoi talks, mutual trust between the two developed recently has not been harmed," Cui Liru, a senior researcher at the Taihe Institute, wrote in Global Times, a government-run newspaper in China.

"This time, they both thought the other side was not going to the summit for nothing. Both had wanted to reach a deal and are now stuck on the issue of what to offer in exchange for what they want," Cui added.

Kim reportedly wanted Trump to lift all economic sanctions on North Korea in exchange for a partial rollback of Pyongyang's nuclear capabilities. Trump balked. "Sometimes you have to walk," Trump told reporters in Hanoi.

But North Korea's delegation in its own press conference denied Trump's claim, insisting it asked for only a partial lifting of sanctions.

"I think North Korea is, as Pyongyang is well aware that it's impossible to completely scrap the sanctions at one go," Cui wrote. "So it found another way -- partially abandoning its nuclear weapons in exchange for a truncated sanctions relief, which is reasonable."

After the first Kim-Trump summit in June 2018, North Korea and the U.S. held extensive talks in order to find ways to bridge differences and implement the Singapore Declaration. They must have found the possibilities. Otherwise, the Hanoi summit wouldn't have taken place.

Judging from Kim's approach and the news release from Pyongyang, North Korea must have expected that Trump would agree to a deal, which the two sides were believed to have negotiated and given their purported nods to.