and U.S. flags lining a bright red carpet, Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump, both dressed in their signature clothing—Kim in his Mao suit and Trump in a dark blue suit with a red tie—approached each other and shook hands, Trump using his left hand to grasp Kim’s right arm. They exchanged pleasantries and then turned to the cameras for a photograph; three thousand journalists were there, broadcasting the historic meeting to all corners of the globe. Later, in a more intimate scene with their backs to the cameras, Kim through his translator said to Trump, “Many people in the world will think of this as a scene from a fantasy…science fiction movie.” His comment presumably reflected the historical significance of the two sitting leaders from North Korea and the United States meeting for the first time and the extreme change from the confrontation of just a few months before the summit. Perhaps it betrayed his own incredulity about what it took to get him to that point in space and time, all of the historical forces that had to converge to propel him into this position, standing shoulder to shoulder with the president of the United States, a feat that neither his grandfather nor his father was able to accomplish in his lifetime. Kim had done it in less than seven years, at the age of thirty-four. In a rare move, the regime, keen to share Kim’s victory with North Korea’s twenty-five million people, transmitted the summit on live television through the Korean Central News Agency instead of the usual delayed broadcast.
During the nearly hour-long private conversation, facilitated by two interpreters, President Trump showed Kim a video, a fictional movie trailer that seemed to underscore the fantastical nature of the meeting. Kitschy, sensational, and dramatic, the four-minute video showed the two men as leading actors who would define the future, its soaring language intended to endow their encounter with immense historical significance and casting them as exceptional heroes among seven billion people in this narrative: “Featuring President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un. In a meeting to remake history. To shine in the sun. One moment. One choice.” While Trump and Kim were the protagonists, the film made it clear that Kim was the one who had to make a stark choice. It showed promise and peril. “History is always evolving,” the solemn narrator intoned. “The past doesn’t have to be the future. Out of darkness can come the light.” A montage of fully stocked supermarkets, a bustling city with skyscrapers, scientists making breakthroughs at state-of-the-art laboratories, and men and women busily at work in factories and manufacturing plants accompanied the narration. On the other hand, if Kim chose his nuclear weapons over economic prosperity and “friendship,” he would face war and deepening poverty.
Although Trump said, “I think he loved it,” Kim might have seen the video as condescending and a reinforcement of his view about why he needed nuclear weapons to prevent the United States from taking the actions that it was threatening not only in the fall of 2017 but in the video itself. The film reflected the mirror-imaging apparent in Trump’s prior statements and those of his senior officials that they could buy their way out of the nuclear impasse with North Korea. Trump later described what he told Kim. “As an example, they have great beaches. You see that whenever they’re exploding their cannons into the ocean, right? I said, ‘Boy, look at the view. Wouldn’t that make a great condo behind?’ And I explained, I said, ‘You know, instead of doing that, you could have the best hotels in the world right there.’ Think of it from a real estate perspective. You have South Korea, you have China, and they own the land in the middle.” Of course, from Kim’s perspective, it was building nuclear weapons, not condos, that got him to this summit.
Moreover, the Singapore joint communiqué, Trump’s apparently unilateral concessions announced at his press conference, and his victory lap in the weeks following the summit negated whatever effect his administration was hoping would be achieved by the film. The communiqué, widely panned by Asia experts for its vague aspirational content, stated that the United States and North Korea would “commit to establish new U.S.-DPRK relations” and “build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.” It also stated that the two sides would work toward recovering and repatriating remains of American service members killed during the Korean