Trump, Kim summit lands with a thud
THE biggest winner of this week’s summit between US president Donald Trump and his North
Korean counterpart, Kim Jong-un, was undoubtedly Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, whose capital, Hanoi, hosted the talks.
Vietnam was celebrating its Lunar New Year holiday when the White House announced Trump’s second summit with Kim would take place in Hanoi.
The city went into overdrive in preparation, sprucing up streets and ordering construction sites tidied. The regeneration was more pronounced than when it hosted the 2017 Asia-pacific Economic Co-operation summit, which drew world leaders to Da Nang.
Two Kim impersonators – one a Thai and the other an Australian – were deported soon after making public appearances in Hanoi this week, while a Trump impersonator, a Canadian, was ordered to remain in his hotel.
The Vietnamese leadership was eager to be seen as a serious player in global affairs and knew that the world’s eyes would be fixed on the country.
Apart from Vietnam coming out on top, not much else appears to have been achieved from the summit. It landed with a thud.
Trump and Kim were expected to finally declare an end to the Korean War, establish liaison offices in each other’s capitals and pronounce on the destruction of North Korea’s main nuclear facility in return for the easing of sanctions against Pyongyang. It failed dismally to achieve any of these goals. The sense that history was about to be made disintegrated.
The Americans claimed the talks with Kim broke down because the North Korean leader wanted all sanctions lifted – something the US could not agree to. The Americans, in turn, wanted Kim to agree to the total denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula before they could lift the sanctions.
It was a Catch 22 with echoes of president Ronald Reagan, who famously marched out of a 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, rather than accept an arms control agreement with Russia that he regarded as flawed.
The world will have to wait for a third Trump-kim summit.
As for Trump, one wonders if he realistically still expects to land the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.