it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting.” Trump’s tone, however, strongly suggested that he wanted the summit to happen. “I was very much looking forward to being there with you,” he wrote, ending the letter with “If you change your mind…please do not hesitate to call me or write.”
Kim then sent Kim Yong Chol, North Korea’s former chief intelligence officer, who was taking on a new role as his top U.S. negotiator, to meet with Trump in the White House for almost two hours. Many Korea experts were dismayed by the appointment of Kim Yong Chol, whom they considered responsible for both masterminding a deadly attack on a South Korean corvette in 2010 that killed forty-six sailors and orchestrating the Sony attack in 2014; they asserted that neither he, nor the regime he represented, could be trusted. It was the first time that a North Korean official had been hosted at the White House in two decades. In what appeared to be a friendly meeting—with Kim handing Trump a jumbo-size letter from Kim Jong Un, which seemed to have pleased Trump—the two sides cemented the commitment to go forward with the Singapore summit.
But then in what probably came as a surprise to Kim—and to Korea watchers and even to Trump’s own advisers—the president followed this last-ditch negotiation by painting a rosy picture of the relationship to the press, stating that North Korea and the United States were “getting along” and that “the relationship we have right now with North Korea is as good as it’s been in a long time.” He said that he did not “even want to use the term ‘maximum pressure’ anymore,” and urged the North Koreans to “take your time”—presumably on denuclearization—batting away previous statements from his senior officials about the urgency of the issue. Trump also admitted that he did not raise human rights (which he had once held up as a central part of his North Korea policy) in his meeting with Kim Yong Chol, an issue that always elicits harsh comments from Pyongyang. Rather, he had reiterated his long-held doubts about the utility of a U.S. presence in East Asia (“And, look, we’re very far away….It’s their neighborhood”) and said he was open to signing a document to end the war (“Can you believe that we’re talking about the ending of the Korean War? You’re talking about 70 years”).
If Kim took away one impression from his negotiator’s White House meeting, it was that he and the U.S. president at least had a potential convergence of interests that made the summit attractive. Given the history of Trump’s long-held suspicions about U.S. alliances, his apparent infatuation with bringing “peace” to Korea, and his jettisoning of the human rights issue, Kim had reason to be optimistic about the Singapore summit.
FANTASY ISLAND
Sentosa Island in Singapore (a city-state with a population of six million in around 280 square miles) is a lush resort area of only two square miles, “a good-time island…dedicated to unabashed fun,” according to the travel website Lonely Planet, with theme parks, aquariums, golf and beach clubs, restaurants, and bars. It was hot and muggy on June 12, 2018, when Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un met. The journalists reporting from the location were seen wiping their sweaty brows and fanning themselves. At the luxurious Capella Hotel, where the summit took place, peacocks roamed the grounds—a sign of new beginnings, suggested the management in a promotional tweet.
Kim Jong Un took center stage even before the summit started. The night before, after having borrowed an Air China Boeing 747 because his own aging jet could not have flown the nearly three thousand miles between Pyongyang and Singapore, Kim went on a surprise evening stroll, while the media (including North Korea’s regime mouthpiece) and curious onlookers took photos and applauded. He even took a selfie with the Singaporean foreign minister and education minister, the three men smiling broadly. Kim waved to the crowds, the camera flashes lighting up his face. He admired Singapore’s development—“Singapore is clean and beautiful and every building is stylish”—and said that he was going to “learn a lot from the good knowledge and experience of Singapore in various fields in the future.” Kim seemed to revel in the attention, elevating himself as a celebrity and a statesman on a par with the U.S. president and setting the tone of the meeting that was to occur twelve hours later.
Set against the rather jarring juxtaposition of the North Korean