The path to peace is littered with failed deals

THE summit may have been the first time a sitting US president has met a North Korean leader at the negotiating table, but it follows a long history of high-level American engagement with Pyongyang over its nuclear ambitions.

Unfortunately for Donald Trump, who has implied a victory that his predecessors were incapable of achieving, the path to peace has been littered with grandiose statements that ended in failed deals and broken promises.

North Korea first started operating a small reactor tailored for making weaponsgrade plutonium in 1986.

However, it was only in 1992 that the US and North Korea rekindled diplomatic ties for the first time since the 1953 armistice that marked a truce to the 195053 Korean War.

In January 1992, the two Koreas signed an agreement on the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, paving the way for high-level meetings between American and North Korean diplomats at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Pyongyang agreed to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to enter its nuclear complex at Yongbyon, and the US called off its joint military drills with South Korea. However, the next two years were spent in a tense diplomatic standoff and in a cat-and-mouse game with the inspectors.

In 1994, Jimmy Carter, the former US president, tried to salvage the diplomatic efforts with the first major accord between the two nations, known as the Agreed Framework. The deal began to collapse in 2002 after George W Bush included North Korea in his “Axis of Evil” State of the Union address.

Diplomatic negotiations continued, however, between 2003 and 2009 in the form of six-party talks between South and North Korea, Russia, Japan, the US and China. North Korea brought an end to the process by announcing a satellite launch. Barack Obama demanded that they be punished and was backed by the UN security council and South Korea.

Pyongyang retaliated by resuming its nuclear weapons programme. Negotiations remained frozen until February 2012, when the US and North Korea announced a “leap day” deal that would see the US providing food aid in return for a moratorium on uranium enrichment and missile testing.

However, in March, Pyongyang announced plans to launch a satellite, and both the satellite and the deal failed to get off the ground.