Trump and Kim will meet again, but why in Vietnam?

President Donald Trump says he looks forward to getting together with North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un for a second face-to-face meeting in late February.

“As part of a bold new diplomacy, we continue our historic push for peace on the Korean Peninsula,” Mr. Trump said Tuesday in his State of the Union address while announcing he will hold a two-day summit with Mr. Kim on Feb. 27-28 in Vietnam to continue his efforts to persuade Mr. Kim to give up his nuclear weapons.

Before Vietnam was announced officially for TrumpKim summit No. 2, some of the options reportedly discussed included Hawaii, Mongolia and Indonesia. However, Vietnam was long said to be at the top of the list. Why Vietnam?

From the Trump administration’s perspective, Vietnam is a shining example of what North Korea’s future could look like.

“We know it’s a real possibility,” Mike Pompeo said during a speech in Hanoi last July, a month after the first Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore. “We see how Vietnam has traveled this remarkable path.”

The path that the secretary of state was pointing to is Vietnam’s post-war economic success, which Mr. Pompeo referred to as a “miracle.”

The turning point for Vietnam, Mr. Pompeo suggested, came just 20 years after the fall of Saigon. In 1995, the U.S. and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam re-established diplomatic relations.

Standing in the Vietnamese capital, Mr. Pompeo had this message for the dictator in North Korea: “President Trump believes your country can replicate this path. It’s yours if you’ll see the moment. The miracle can be yours. It can be your miracle for North Korea as well.”

So, from Washington’s perspective, there is powerful symbolism in choosing Vietnam for Mr. Trump’s second summit with Mr. Kim.

“We have gone from enemy to partner, and the U.S. Vietnamese relationship is growing by leaps and bounds,” says Zachary Abuza of the National War College in Washington. “We have seen a surge in U.S. investment in the country. They’ve increased their military relationship with the United States.”

Vietnam as a summit venue would work well for North Korea, too, starting with a very practical reason.

“It’s ironic that North Korea has the capability to shoot an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach Washington, D.C. But it doesn’t have the technology to build a passenger airplane that can travel more than about 4,000 kilometers,” says Sung-Yoon Lee of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Flying in a North Korean plane is thought to be non-negotiable for Mr. Kim’s second meeting with Mr. Trump. So, the location would have to be in range of North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang.

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the country’s official name, is not just closer geographically to North Korea. Mr. Lee says the national narratives of the two communist governments also resonate. After all, Vietnam fought a war against the American imperialists — and won.

“Vietnam has been a shining model of communist-led unification for the North Korean regime for decades,” Mr. Lee says.

It was communist North Vietnam that defeated the U.S. and its allies in the south, Mr. Lee says, and then effectively took control over the entire country on its own terms.