‘Confident’ Kim sends out the right message to wider world
To the rest of the world focused on whether Kim Jongun is really willing to negotiate away his nuclear weapons, North Korea has a message: He isn’t embarking on talks with his rivals out of desperation. He’s meeting them as the proud leader of a nuclear power.
And, judging from his summit yesterday with South Korean President Moon Jaein, it appears he wants to stay that way.
In a deliberate show of confidence – almost bravado – Kim literally strolled across the military demarcation line that has divided the Koreas for three generations, sat as
an equal at the negotiating table with Moon and then joined him at an intricately arranged banquet before riding his black Mercedes limousine back into the land he rules absolutely.
The optics were largely the same as his first summit, when he ended six years of self-imposed isolation in the North and met Chinese President Xi Jinping last month in Beijing. There were lots of feel-good moments, enthusiastic smiles and big handshakes for carefully staged photo ops – emotionally charged visuals that will play just as well abroad as they will strum the ethnic and national pride of his domestic audience. But any real promise regarding the future of all those missiles and nuclear weapons was missing.
In his joint statement with Moon, Kim agreed to seek the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.
It was an expected nod to his host, who is desperately pushing to ease tensions on the peninsula and who holds the key to the economic resources Kim just as desperately needs to refuel his economy. But it was conspicuously void of any concrete steps or timeframe toward that broad and elusive goal.
A careful reading of what Kim himself has said and what the North’s media have - and have not - been reporting over the past few months sheds some light on why.
Virtually none of Kim’s diplomatic overtures since his New Year’s address, when he first vowed to improve relations with South Korea this year, have been announced domestically in advance. While millions elsewhere could watch Kim’s historic first encounter with Moon live on television or the internet, North Koreans got only a brief note on the television news and a few lines in the ruling party newspaper saying he had departed Pyongyang early yesterday morning.
Kim has kept his position vague enough to accommodate significant shifts toward real denuclearisation talks in the future, or shifts in the opposite direction. Determining that he may do will need to wait until he meets with Trump.