in Hanoi for a second summit on February 27–28, 2019. Despite the weather—the temperature was 73 degrees but with a steaming, uncomfortable humidity over 90 percent—Kim was much more at ease in this meeting, as was Trump. Their body language was in sync: Both men rested their elbows casually on the table placed between them. They touched each other’s elbows when they spoke and laughed easily, as if they were old friends. When they walked from one venue to another, Kim’s gait was more confident, his arms swaying, his hand gestures easy and relaxed. In fact, he seemed to have gained weight since Singapore, his plumpness stretching his skin smooth, his growing size a metaphor for his enlarged stature since the start of his experiment with summitry. He smiled contentedly and appreciatively at President Trump’s repeated statements about his desire to see North Korea become an “economic powerhouse.” And Kim almost certainly took note of how Trump downplayed denuclearization when he reiterated that “speed is not that important to me….What is important is that we do the right deal,” and hinted at future summits (“I’m sure over the years we’ll be together a lot”). Indeed, they would meet again just a few months later.
But the summit ended early. And there was no joint statement, as had been widely anticipated. Thousands of bewildered journalists who had camped out to capture the spectacle packed up and left, and Kim’s motorcade departed quickly, as members of his entourage scrambled to jump into moving cars. Given the gaping hole between U.S. and North Korean expectations, the summit was little more than a vanity project, a product of both leaders’ hubris and overconfidence that the sheer force of their charisma and their budding friendship could get them a good deal, even though they almost certainly were briefed by their working-level negotiators about the limited parameters of what the other side was asking for and willing to give. Like Trump, Kim miscalculated by gambling that he had a more malleable partner. Both his assessment that he could stymie working-level talks on the more sensitive issues of denuclearization and his coolness toward a peace declaration, including the U.S. proposal for establishing liaison offices in Washington and Pyongyang—an important step toward normalizing diplomatic ties—also laid bare that Kim was not serious about “peace” and that sanctions removal was more important than improving North Korea’s relationship with the United States. Instead, he walked away after having failed to trade the closure of some unidentified portion of his aging Yongbyon nuclear research site in exchange for the lifting of the bulk of the more effective sanctions on North Korea’s export industries, which would have amounted to billions of dollars in revenue that the regime could then have funneled back into the programs proscribed by the United States.
Yet Trump’s mindset about the effectiveness of his positive relationship with Kim and his affinity and talent for big symbolic moves, improvisation, and drama were hard to shake. Four months after Hanoi, the president, in keeping with his personal brand of diplomacy, tweeted an offer to meet the North Korean leader at the DMZ just to “say hello.” Trump was going to be on the Korean Peninsula that weekend anyway for a summit with Moon, but by crossing the MDL to meet with Kim, he became the first sitting U.S. president to set foot in the North. As they had in Singapore and Hanoi, the two men smiled broadly for the cameras, greeted each other warmly, and pledged to continue negotiations. Having learned the effectiveness of appealing to Trump’s penchant for the theatrical, Kim played along, as he also surely recognized the value of creating the illusion of progress, even though the dictator’s promises of economic prosperity for his people were growing increasingly hollow. Trump’s preference for the top-down approach and strong hints about a future summit—he invited Kim to the White House again—without any nuclear concessions from Kim, only incentivized the regime to continue advancing its military capabilities and hew closely to its Trump-centric diplomacy.
So after impressive motorcades in Singapore and Hanoi, historic “firsts,” flag-waving onlookers, media buildup, and expressions of mutual respect and admiration between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, the U.S.–North Korean meetings produced…the status quo.
In November 2018, EBS, a South Korean public broadcasting channel, sparked a controversy when it released a 3-D puzzle in which children could create a figure of Kim Jong Un. The puzzle described Kim as “the youngest head-of-state in the world”