by publicizing the high-profile shuttering of the nuclear test site at Punggye-ri and agreeing to dismantle a missile test site at Sohae. These reversible and symbolic moves, eagerly embraced by President Trump and President Moon and others as signs of Kim’s sincerity in making good on his promise to denuclearize, also probably only reinforced his belief that the theater of denuclearization was more important than doing anything actual or verifiable. At the summit, Kim ignored a question about whether he agreed to give up his nuclear weapons and spoke in generalities: “The world is going to see a major change….It was not easy to get here. The past worked as fetters on our limbs, and the old prejudices and practices worked as obstacles on our way forward. But we overcame all of them today, and we are here today.”
Kim might have been talking simply about the fact of the unprecedented meeting itself. But he might have been looking back with pride and self-satisfaction about how he had brought North Korea center stage despite the early criticisms and doubts about his leadership. As President Trump stood beside him, telling reporters that Kim was “a very worthy, very smart negotiator,” perhaps Kim did believe that he was the hero in this fantasy that appeared to be gelling into reality.
But optics, spin, and performance aside, reality keeps puncturing the narrative of progress that the Trump and Moon administrations are trying to champion. Washington and Seoul continue to downplay reports that show Kim has been enriching uranium, expanding long-range missile bases, building new ballistic missiles, and upgrading nuclear weapons–related facilities, with Trump choosing to narrowly define progress on denuclearization as the absence of nuclear and ballistic missile testing. And even if it were true that Kim came to the negotiating table as a result of maximum pressure, his elevation as a star on television and in social media since 2018 has eroded the sanctions infrastructure that took herculean efforts to build. As maximum pressure morphed into maximum flexibility for North Korea, Kim is probably learning that both his in-your-face provocative actions and his passive-aggressive diplomatic intransigence are enough to ensure his survival and his country’s relevance and independence. The North Korean threat still exists, and Trump’s disingenuous claims otherwise mask the multiple dimensions of risk that it poses to regional and global security.
As the Trump administration started gearing up for a second Trump-Kim summit, National Security Adviser John Bolton admitted in early December that North Korea had not taken steps to move closer to denuclearization since Singapore. Vice President Pence similarly acknowledged the lack of progress, when he told Fox News Sunday that at the next summit President Trump would urge Kim to take “concrete steps” toward denuclearization and that he would “lay out our expectations for North Korea.”
In the months following the Singapore summit, nuclear negotiations between the United States and North Korea remained deadlocked. Kim made it clear that he does not intend to give up his nuclear weapons. As if in frustration over the insistence by Trump administration officials that North Korea’s “fully and final verified denuclearization” must precede sanctions removal, the regime issued a commentary in late December that reiterated its existing position about refusing “unilateral disarmament” and showed how far apart Washington and Pyongyang were on an agreement of what “denuclearization” meant: “The proper definition of Korean Peninsula denuclearization is ‘completely removing the United States nuclear threat against North Korea’ before it is getting rid of our nuclear deterrent.”
To underscore what he wants, Kim reiterated the regime’s long-standing demands in his 2019 New Year’s address—an end to the U.S.–South Korean military exercises, a peace mechanism to replace the 1953 armistice that ended the military conflict of the Korean War without formally ending the war, and the removal of sanctions—while declaring that he is ready “to meet the US president again anytime.” Kim stressed Korean unity in an us-versus-them framework, most likely in an effort to appeal to ethnonationalism in both the North and the South. “We will never tolerate the interference and intervention of outside forces who stand in the way of national reconciliation,” Kim said, and stressed that Koreans are “the master[s] of peace on the peninsula.” President Moon touted the speech as having a “positive effect on resolving the Korean Peninsula issue smoothly in the new year,” while President Trump tweeted, “I also look forward to meeting with Chairman Kim who realizes so well that North Korea possesses great economic potential!”