Anniversaries are usually celebratory occasions, but not this one. It’s now been two years since the infamous Hanoi summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, and there is precious little to show other than an important lesson in how negotiations with North Korea can sour.
Joe Biden is now nearing his first one-hundred days in office. Little has been said about dealing with the North Korea problem. But one thing is for sure: a US-North Korea summit is far from imminent.
Following their first encounter in Singapore in June 2018, it suited Trump and Kim to meet again. For both leaders, the theatre and optics of their gathering was too good to resist a second outing. It is then that things appeared to go wrong. The Singapore statement committed to ‘establish new U.S.-DPRK relations’, seeing the North pledge to ‘work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula’. But at Hanoi at the end of February 2019, there was to be no joint statement nor a post-summit lunch for Trump, Kim, and their respective officials.
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