Why the Trump-Kim meeting at the DMZ was all show and no substance

Donald Trump claims to be cleaning up the ‘fiery mess’ Barack Obama left on the Korean peninsula, when in fact he was the one who started the fire. Meanwhile, Kim Jong-un is playing Trump’s obsession with personal diplomacy to his advantage

Peter J. Li

Published: 3:00am, 4 Jul 2019

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On June 30, US President Donald Trump held a historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Panmunjom at the demilitarised zone between the two Koreas, causing as big a stir with the move as the leaders’ Singapore summit did.

It seemed a new high in Trump’s Twitter diplomacy.

Trump had extended a last-minute invitation to Kim on social media and he didn’t forget to inflate the significance of his latest meeting, calling it a “great day for the world”.

In Trump’s assessment, US-North Korean relations had been a “fiery mess” under his predecessor Barack Obama, and he deserved credit for cleaning up after Obama and restoring peace on the Korean peninsula.

Former US president Jimmy Carter (left) bids goodbye to Ri Yong Ho, North Korea's vice foreign minister, at Pyongyang airport during denuclearisation talks in April 2011. Photo: AP

The Panmunjom meeting was indeed a breakthrough: no sitting US president before Trump had set foot in North Korean territory. The visits to Pyongyang by former presidents Jimmy Carter in 1994 and Bill Clinton in 2009 did not represent a change in US policy.

But has Trump opened a new chapter in US-North Korean relations? Did the meeting advance US interests or was it a spectacle staged for his re-election bid?

The Korean peninsula is the last frontier of the cold war. Although tension has persisted on the peninsula since the Korean war, things were largely under control before Trump became president.

It was Trump himself who escalated tension by warning of “fire and fury”, calling Kim “little rocket man”, and boasting about the US’ “much bigger” nuclear arsenal.

As a foreign policy novice, Trump had underestimated the complexity of US-North Korean relations and believed he could coerce the young Kim into submission.

Unlike most other small states, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has the support of a superpower. Not only is China North Korea’s economic lifeline, it is also a geopolitical partner.

Contrary to Trump’s claim, the Panmunjom meeting, like the Singapore and Hanoi summits, made no progress. It was more a corrective action. In a series of Trump-Kim meetings, the US president’s tactics shifted from intimidation to sweet talk.

He was as good as admitting the failure of his previous coercive policy. His earlier pursuit of Pyongyang’s denuclearisation seems to have given way to personal diplomacy, with an eye to his audience back at home.

When Trump took office, there was neither a hot war nor a “fiery mess” on the Korean peninsula. His claim about bringing peace to the region is farcical. His only accomplishment, if any, is putting out the fire he started.

Yet, as a former reality television star, Trump is no doubt an expert illusionist.

In the final hours of the G20 summit in Osaka, he made a seemingly spontaneous offer on Twitter to meet Kim at the DMZ. Many in the media danced to Trump’s tune, not suspecting they had been tricked.

Seriously, could the Panmunjom meeting really have been arranged at such notice, following an invite sent out on social media?

International diplomacy is not short on secrecy. A summit meeting between leaders of two hostile countries would require weeks or months of planning and preparations often kept secret.

Behind that invitation on Twitter, there could have been weeks of secret interactions among players from the White House, the presidential Blue House in Seoul and Kim’s inner circle in Pyongyang.

Kim could also have informed Xi Jinping of his upcoming Panmunjom meeting when the Chinese president paid his first state visit to Pyongyang days before the Group of 20 summit.

Trump certainly has good reason to hype the power he wields via his Twitter account. He expects his supporters to follow and act on his tweets, and now he can claim he got Kim to respond to his tweets.

However, Kim is no pawn of Trump’s. Kim might be young and inexperienced, but he does listen to his advisers.

He has so far navigated Pyongyang’s superpower relations fairly smoothly. To Kim, Trump is a gold mine. He has played Trump’s active courtship to North Korea’s advantage.

Kim’s first meeting with Xi was quickly placed on the agenda after the announcement, in March 2018, that Trump would meet Kim face to face.

The impending Trump-Kim summit boosted Kim’s confidence and position, and laid the groundwork for Kim’s visit to Beijing later in March.

Almost in parallel to the Trump-Kim summits, four more meetings between Kim and Xi have led to rejuvenated relations between North Korea and China.

During Xi’s first state visit to Pyongyang on June 20-21, Kim publicly assured the Chinese delegation that North Korea was a trustworthy ally.

North Korea would never forget the sacrifice of Chinese soldiers in the Korean war. No outside forces – the US, in particular – could derail the special relationship between Pyongyang and Beijing.

Kim has a more immediate objective to achieve with the help of Trump’s personal diplomacy: the elimination of UN sanctions on North Korea.

Trump’s obsession with summit diplomacy has sent the wrong signal to other countries that have cut back their economic ties with Pyongyang.

The erosion of the sanctions is unavoidable. Dangling economic benefits to get North Korea’s compliance or cooperation showed Trump’s poor understanding of the limits of US-North Korean relations.

The Kim regime will never open up to the US the way China has opened up to the industrialised West since the late 1970s. But Kim is capitalising on lowered tension on the peninsula to prepare for his economic reform programme.

The significance of the Panmunjom meeting should not be exaggerated. Instead of making substantive progress, the meeting only served to bring back to the peninsula the normalcy disrupted by Trump in his first year in office.

The failure of the Hanoi summit should have awoken Trump to his inability to denuclearise North Korea without making substantial concessions on the part of the US.

But, to Kim, Trump’s obsession with summit diplomacy must be a windfall.

Peter J. Li, PhD, is an associate professor of East Asian politics at the University of Houston-Downtown. [email protected]

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