The Hanoi Summit – We Asked Dagyum Kate Ji What Happens Next in U.S.-North Korea Relations

Dagyum Ji

Security, Asia

"South Korea should encourage Pyongyang and Washington to sufficiently and deeply look into the underlying problems causing the failure of the Hanoi summit."

No one can precisely predict the course that Washington and Pyongyang will take in the future. But the next step of relations between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the United States could largely depend on the three factors: progress in taking the current working-level negotiation platform to a new level, Kim Jong-un’s stance on nuclear talks, and Seoul’s approach to its mediation.

The breakdown of the Hanoi summit, once again, clearly shows the lack of substantial, detailed, and technical discussions at a working-level. This is despite Washington and Pyongyang having set up a working group last July to deal with “nitty-gritty stuff” including the validation of efforts to achieve denuclearization.

One example is that both sides have not come to an agreement on the precise definition of the Yongbyon nuclear complex. (Although North Korea expressed its willingness to permanently dismantle it in accordance with the U.S. corresponding measures in the Pyongyang Joint Declaration.)

My question is: what is the implication issue that was not sufficiently discussed at their pre-summit talks? Without a platform where America and North Korea can have a substantive discussion—even with the presence of nuclear technicians—both countries will not be able to make any progress from their abstract agreement signed by Donald Trump and Kim in Singapore.  

Given that the problems including the relaxation of sanctions cannot be simply resolved with the top-down approach, they should find a way to avoid a summit solely for the sake of a summit like this time in order to get back on the right track.