Donald Trump: How Kim Jong-un played US president after Singapore summit

It was the meeting where the US and North Korea “fell in love”. But hopes for a new relationship are over and it comes at a dangerous time.

They met in Singapore. They met in Korea’s ‘no man’s land’. They showered each other in mutual admiration. But what has been achieved?

Two years on from the historic meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, international analysts are saying Trump has been played.

Chairman Kim Jong-un has now rejected all avenues of international diplomacy and promised to get back to expanding his weapons program. The long-distance romance is well and truly over.

SHAKY BEGINNINGS

The relationship started as a very rocky one. In 2017, Trump threatened Kim with “fire and fury” after North Korea successfully tested a missile with the range to hit the US. Six months later, Kim asked for a personal meeting. It was supposed to be the US President’s great victory.

In June 2018, North Korea’s Great Leader travelled to Singapore by private train. Amid great fanfare, the pair met and agreed to “work toward” the “complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula”.

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It was a great victory for Trump: the US, he tweeted, could “sleep well at night … there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea”.

It was a great victory for Kim: it gave him and his outlaw regimen much-needed legitimacy. And time.

For months, everything was blissful.

“He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love,” Trump declared.

Two years on, the marriage of convenience is over.

“Even a slim ray of optimism for peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula has faded away into a dark nightmare,” declared North Korea’s foreign minister Ri Son-Gwon according to North Korea’s state news agency KCNA.

ARMED AND DANGEROUS

The first signs of a breakdown in the trans-Pacific relationship began after a second Trump-Kim summit in February last year. The pair failed to reach a new agreement.

Then, in December, Pyongyang’s propaganda department threatened the US with a “Christmas gift” like no other.

Nothing resulted. North Korea fell quiet as the world reeled under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But, on June 15, Chairman Kim had the Inter-Korean Liaison Office blown up.

A close up view of the Inter-Korean Liaison Office after it was destroyed by explosives by North Korean forces on June 16th. Picture: AFP PHOTO / Satellite image ©2020 Maxar Technologies.

It had been a centre for cross-border communications with the South and the rest of the world.

It had been a beacon of hope for reunification and a reduction in tensions.

Destroying it was a dramatic declaration: The marriage is off.

Now Pyongyang’s foreign minister Ri has declared North Korea will revive its strategic goal to “build up a more reliable force to cope with the long-term military threats from the US.”

DIVISIVE DIVORCE

Former White House national security adviser John Bolton writes in his memoir of how the President compared his relationship with the Chairman as dating: “(Trump) always wanted to be the one who broke up with the girl first”.

“He didn’t want the girl to break up with him,” he writes. “And he used that to describe whether he would cancel the summit with Kim Jong-un first or whether we would risk the North Koreans cancelling it. And I thought it was an insight into the President, candidly given, that showed how he approached this”.

But Kim has got in the first blow. The Singapore tryst, his foreign minister declared, had been a con. The meeting had been “nothing but a foolish trick hatched to keep us bound to dialogue and use it in favour of the political situation and election in the US”.

“Never again will we provide the US chief executive with another package to be used for achievements without receiving any returns. Nothing is more hypocritical than an empty promise,” said his foreign minister.

Kim Jong-un is said to have played Donald Trump with empty promises. Picture: Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File.

Pyongyang didn’t get its desired lifting of sanctions. But President Trump did block new ones from being imposed and cancelled military training operations with South Korea.

Pyongyang did halt its nuclear testing. But Kim continued to develop and build up his long-range missile strike capability. US intelligence has also judged North Korea never stopped building new nuclear warheads.

“In terms of the so-called goals of the summit, we made no progress in any of those things,” says Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) analyst Victor Cha. “These meetings were largely photo ops as opposed to meaningful steps toward achieving peace on the Korean peninsula.”

EMPTY WORDS

Trump’s much-touted Singapore Agreement emphasised four points; enhancing diplomatic relations, working towards peace, denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, and returning the remains of US soldiers who fell during the Korean War.

The remains of 55 fallen soldiers have since been handed over.

And that’s about the total of the agreement’s outcomes.

“Despite all of its warts, the Singapore summit and Trump’s claimed bromance with Kim could be justified if it leads to some cessation or rollback of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and delivery capabilities,” Cha says.

“Indeed, Kim did commit to a self-imposed moratorium on nuclear or long-range ballistic missile testing. Aside from this one concession, however, North Korea has continued to perfect targeting, guidance, and fuel capacities of its short-range missile systems; grow its warhead stockpiles; and amass more weapons-grade fissile material.”

Kim Jong-un (right) overseeing a "long-range artillery" drill in a picture handed out by state media in March 2020. Picture: AFP PHOTO/KCNA VIA KNS.

In January, Kim told a Communist Party Central Committee meeting that there would be an “imminent demonstration” of a new weapon and that the nuclear testing moratorium was over.

No new nuclear or intercontinental missile test has yet been observed. But work has been seen at the secret Tongchang-ri launch facility, short-range missile tests have resumed, and the construction of a new ballistic-missile submarine revealed. Most significantly, North Korea’s uranium enrichment plant has not ceased operations.

Trump, for his part, has held up more of the agreement.

He immediately suspended military exercises with Seoul without first notifying the South Korean government or his own Pentagon. He began blocking moves to impose fresh sanctions.

But Kim’s hoped for lifting of sanctions never eventuated.

WHO GETS THE KIDS?

“North Korea has shown a historical tendency to ramp up provocations in US presidential elections years,” Cha says. “Kim seems to be following a family tradition of ramping up provocations to improve his WMD systems and raise the ante for an eventual return to diplomacy — either in a Trump second term or a Joe Biden first term.”

The problem now, however, hinges firmly on credibility.

Both sides have revealed their hand. Both sides have demonstrated their techniques and characteristics. Both sides have emerged appearing somewhat hollow.

But the Singapore Agreement, Cha says, had a significant – if hidden – value.

“The most important accomplishment of the meeting was to provide each leader with an exit ramp from the near-war crisis of 2017,” he says.

The tension of the “fire and fury” standoff had brought North Korea and the US to a brink where “miscalculation on either side could have easily ramped up into an inadvertent military conflict”.

Now, Chairman Kim has the initiative. He has missiles. He has nuclear warheads. The next move is in his hands.

Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer | @JamieSeidel