sanctions implementation and his country’s economic and political dependence on China, even as he tries to maintain China’s support. Kim Jong Un has declared that he has completed the nuclear project that his grandfather started and his father nurtured. North Korea’s identity is wrapped up in the idea of being a nuclear state—it is in the constitution, its monuments, its rhetoric, and its culture. To trade that away for money from Americans would have been the ultimate form of dishonor and betrayal to one of his country’s founding principles.
So when the Trump administration framed the first summit with Kim as American capitalism helping to develop North Korea, Kim probably saw it as American “imperialists” seeking to exploit his country’s people and resources. A senior North Korean official said in response to such U.S. declarations: “We have never had any expectation of US support in carrying out our economic construction and will not at all make such a deal in [the] future.” At the same time, Kim might see it as worthwhile to make use of U.S. comments about sending investment and American know-how to North Korea, and the president’s optimism about their personal chemistry, hoping to coax other countries to follow suit so that he can pocket the benefits of engagement without making real concessions on his nuclear program.
One’s own assumptions are hard to identify and even harder to check without a willingness to learn and incorporate new or different information. While President Trump was openly stating that he wasn’t preparing very much for the meeting, Kim was busy doing his homework.
KNOWING TRUMP
Trump believed “improvising was his strength,” according to Bob Woodward, and that foreign policy was about personal relationships. Meanwhile, Kim was preparing, not having anticipated that he would spend the first half of 2018 planning for a meeting with the U.S. president. After Trump’s surprise announcement in March that he would be willing to meet with Kim, North Korea did not publicly acknowledge the possibility of a Kim-Trump meeting until a month later. Kim told a Politburo meeting on April 9 that he had “made a profound analysis and appraisal of the orientation of the development of the north-south relations at present and the prospect of the DPRK-U.S. dialogue.” The delay suggests that Kim, surprised by Trump’s first move, was calculating his response. And he used his meetings with President Moon to gather information about President Trump. Lip-readers who watched Moon and Kim hold their private dialogue at the March 2018 summit reported that Kim asked Moon about U.S. intentions and expressed his desire for “positive results” from a meeting with Trump. During his trip to Beijing in late March, Kim almost certainly spoke with President Xi about the United States and the president’s agenda before he finally confirmed publicly that he would be willing to sit down with Trump.
This series of summits and meetings in advance of the Singapore event gave Kim a decided advantage. Before he met with Trump on June 12, Kim met twice with Moon and Xi. And as speculation about a meeting with Putin swirled, Abe’s insistence on maintaining maximum pressure and resolving the controversy over the abduction of Japanese citizens by North Korea made him an outsider in the era of reconciliation and historical forgetfulness. In essence, Kim squeezed a couple of years’ worth of summits into the first six months of 2018, without having had to make any concessions on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, appalling human rights violations, or ongoing cyberattack operations. On top of that, Kim’s every move dominated regional and global headlines. Images of him blanketed the media: walking side by side with Xi on a red carpet, smiling ear to ear with Trump in Singapore, hanging out with South Korean K-pop musicians, warmly gripping the hand of a visiting senior Chinese official, and enjoying the banter at a wine-soaked banquet with President Moon’s envoys.
In meeting with South Korean and Chinese leaders, Kim was no doubt seeking, in part, to shape and bound the agenda of his meeting with Trump and validate his own assumptions about the U.S. president and the intentions of regional leaders. His goals were probably to shore up support from Seoul and Beijing on removal of international sanctions and to elicit their assistance to put pressure on the United States to provide incentives for North Korean denuclearization and maintain the mood of diplomacy. His engagement included the familiar bromides that Korea watchers and policymakers were used to hearing from his father